Upgrading my ASUS gaming laptop's RAM and HDD

Hello to one and all at NotebookReview. I am a prospective university student looking to study Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall, and I recently bought an ASUS G1S-A1 gaming laptop to match my needs and hopefully carry me though college.
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=5&l2=132&l3=490&l4=0&model=1674&modelmenu=2

However, I have watched my hard drive fill by just over half of its 160GB, and I started to contemplate upgrade possibilities.

A quick background on my computer needs: I am a power gamer who will also be using heavy visual editing software while pursuing Architecture. I am also a music fanatic coming from an equally obsessed family (my father has 551GB of music – 67,000 songs – across two of his hard drives). Thus, my hard drive space is getting eaten by games like Oblivion, Crysis, Bioshock and other first-person, role-playing, and real-time-strategy games, as well as by music and potentially video in the future as well.

My questions are as follows:

1. What is the largest laptop hard drive currently on the market? I saw a news headline saying that Toshiba and Scorpio make 320GB laptop hard drives, but these are 5400RPM. I wish to future-proof my laptop as best as possible, and at the moment I believe 7200RPM is the way to go; is this correct, or is there an insignificant difference between the two revolution speeds? If they are practically the same, then I value space more than speed, and might consider these drives.

2. Can anyone suggest a good laptop hard drive that is both spacious but also hopefully 7200RPM? I hope to find a hard drive with significantly more space and speed than my current 160GB 5400RPM setup. The largest hard drive that Seagate carries, from what I can tell, is only 200GB.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/momentus/momentus_7200.2/

3. How is my laptop’s hard drive divided? When I open “My Computer”, I see two directories - C: and D:. Are these merely subdivisions of the 160GB hard drive, or do I actually have two 80GB hard drives in my laptop? Obviously the latter answer would be outstanding because in that case I could upgrade both drives separately, but ASUS’s website says “160GB”, and I’m inclined to believe them because they’ve amazed me in all areas as of late.

4. Could I possibly replace the hard drive myself? I have never replaced computer parts on my own – the closest I’ve come is replacing the drive in a 4GB iPod G1 Nano. However, this video makes it look easy:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11379_7-6445033-1.html
Is this suicide? I don’t want to ruin this expensive computer, but I also don’t want to tack more onto this upgrade’s price tag for labor I could have done myself with little trouble.

With the HDD questions taken care of, I also have some RAM questions. My laptop currently has two sticks of 1GB DDR2-667MHz RAM. I wish to upgrade the maximum supported quantity of 4GB. I know I cannot use DDR3 in the DDR2 slots, and to be honest, my wallet doesn’t feel too bad about it. However:

1. Is the increased RAM frequency a result of overclocking? If so, how does that benefit the user? I have never understood how a piece of hardware can operate at better than its listed maximum efficiency just because Consumer X performed Secret Operation Y on it.

2. Is the increased RAM frequency worth investing in? I’ve seen 1033MHz, 800MHz and 667MHz on the market, amongst other frequencies. Would an increased frequency show significant improvements over lower frequencies? I’m looking to the future here – perhaps the higher RAM would be a lesser substitute for DDR3 RAM. The last factor to think about here is that my laptop’s GPU is an nVIDIA GeForce 8600m GT, which has 256MB of dedicated DDR3 video RAM, but can share up to 767MB of regular RAM to bring its maximum up to the value listed in DirectXDiagnosticTool, “1023MB”, via a technology called TurboCache. Would a higher RAM frequency interact better with the GPU’s DDR3 video RAM?

3. Can anyone suggest a good pair of 2GB RAM sticks at whatever frequency they think would best fit my needs? I've heard good things about Corsair, for instance, but I don't know if they're the best available.

4. Would increasing the frequency of my RAM and/or the speed of my hard drive hurt my battery life? ASUS is known for poor energy management, although I’ve never experienced any upsets with my laptop’s battery.

Thank you very much, NotebookReview community. You guys maintain one of the most coherent, composed and clean forums I’ve ever stumbled across, and I can only hope that I’ve matched your standards with my post.

Sincerely,
Richman

 

Answers to HDD questions
1. Largest 2.5" laptop hard drive is the Toshiba 500gb 5400rpm HDD. It's relatively new and newegg isn't selling them yet. These drive however, can be purchased from ebay.
2. Largest 7200rpm laptop HDD is 200gb
3. You only have 1 hard drive and it's partitioned into 2 parts by Asus as a default
4. Yes, replacing a hard drive can easily be done by yourself. Just make sure you have OS and all your drivers ready

Answers to ram quesitons
1. Yes, but to a certain extent because your ram works in sync with your fsb and you probably won't notice any difference.
2. See #1 and higher ram speeds won't do much for graphics performance. The advertised "1023MB shared blah blah blah..." is mostly an advertising gimmick. Most games will never utilize that much memory anyways.
3. Buy your ram according to your fsb speed. Any brand will do since there isn't any difference for the most part. eg.. if your CPU's fsb runs at 667mhz, get ram with 667mhz speeds.
4. Ram, not so much. Hard drive, definitely yes.

 

Wow! I posted this thread before going to bed last night and suddenly I have easy answers to all my questions. Thanks, EmporiumBoutique.

I will go with a 5400RPM drive after reading about the 7200RPM's effects on battery life in the Sticky about already-known hardware. The 500GB drive sounds perfect, especially because I expect its price to have dropped somewhat by the time I actually MUST get this upgrade.

My processor's FSB is 800MHz as listed on the ASUS page for the G1S-A1. I suppose I'll get that type of RAM.

However, I thought of some other questions:

How useful is the video I posted for explaining how to replace hard drives? Should I take my laptop to the token computer geek friend to make sure that I know exactly where my hard drive is?

Also, the impression I'm getting is that for hard drives and RAM, the manufacturer is practically irrelevant - is that true?

 

For the harddrive, your best bet is to get a Samsung or Western Digital 320gb 5400rpm drive. They are only about $140 on Newegg, so it is a cost effective solution, which will give you more space and more speed cause the drive has a higher data density.
Replacing a harddrive is very easy. Literally its like removing 2 screws, and then swapping drives, putting new screws in, and then installing the operating system and programs.

AS for the memory, yes your processor does use a 800Mhz FSB, but no intel based laptop on the market can utilize Pc6400 800Mhz memory.
Your system has Pc5300 667Mhz memory in it, because 667Mhz memory is the fastest memory supported by the chipset in your laptop.
When you mention all the memory is the same, well its yes and no.
There are 4 major memory manufactures Qimonda, Hynix, Samsung and Micron. Basically their chips are used on every memory card. However, you should strive to get memory from a reliable manufacturer, like Corsair, Kingston, OCZ, Crucial or Patriot, because they tend to use the higher quality Micron memory chips, and they all carry a lifetime warranty on their memory cards.

Congratz on the acceptance to Carnegie Mellon, I am an architecture student at RPI. I would have went to Carnegie, but their architecture program was too artsy and liberal for me. I hope you enjoy it, its a lot of work, so its good you have a big music collection. Hope you have a good set of headphones, cause the studio does get loud.

K-TRON

 

Perfect! Samsung sounds good to my ignorant ears, since they're on the list of major memory manufacturers you mentioned for RAM. The nice thing about hard drives is that repeated upgrades are not a total waste, since you usually get to keep your old drives as external storage afterward. I think that the 320GB hard drive would suit me well, and perhaps if that fills up in the future, I'll upgrade to a 500GB.

Thanks for the warm welcome, K-Tron! I was accepted at RPI as well but, ironically, I preferred the artsy liberal feel of Carnegie Mellon.

I assume that, if Vista came pre-installed on the hard drive I currently own, I should get one of those "DIY" kits with hard drive cloning software as described in the video I posted? Those take EVERYTHING with them, don't they? Of course, the other benefit shown in said video was the casing for the old hard drive to use as external storage.

My newest question:

How does one partition a hard drive manually? I really like the way that my drives are separated, but I don't know how to manage space like that. Can a drive be partitioned by the user?

Thanks, and I'm sorry if the questions I'm asking are straying from the topic of the thread. I just hoped to keep my mess of questions tidy in a single thread.

 

You can partition the harddrive after you clone your disk.
You can simply run a program called partition magic.
It will allow you to specify the size of the partition, and it will allow you to create a partition in the drive.
Asus as well as many other manufacturers do this, because the operating system is on one partition, and all of the install files and operating system boot loaders are on the other partition. This is why one partition is like 160Gb + and the other is 10Gb or so.

Some good cloning software is Norton Ghost and Acronis.
They work pretty well, and will copy everything from the one drive to the other.

K-TRON

 

Perfect. I learn more about my computer with every page I read from this amazing forum.

K-TRON, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but could you or anyone else tell me what the difference is between these three sets of 2GB sticks? There are so few differences, with such a drastic price difference (especially between the first two models), that I feel I should probably figure out the cause of the jump.

Kingston 2x2GB DDR2-667MHz.
No Heat Spreader, Unbuffered, 240-Pin, SDRAM, $82
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134193

Kingston 2x2GB DDR2-667MHz.
Heat Spreader, Fully Buffered, 240-Pin, FB-DIMM, $285
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134630

G.Skill 2x2GB DDR2-667MHz.
Heat Spreader, Unbuffered, 200-Pin, SO-DIMM, $80
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231165

I don't understand what the differences between these products are. Is there a particular type of RAM - SDRAM, SO-DIMM or FB-DIMM - that is better than the others? Is the heat spreader important to invest in? It seems there are a lot of models without it, which suggests that it is unnecessary. However, knowing the issues people sometimes face with heat and laptop efficiency, perhaps the G.Skill sticks would be the best purchase!

Anyways, I hope to get these fussy purchase questions over and done with - I know that it can be tedious to have people approach you with "which is the best?" questions. I'm mostly just looking to learn about RAM for my own curiosity, since my RAM upgrades don't need to happen immediately.

 

These ram won't work on your laptop (except for the last one you listed). You should be looking at 200pin ram modules (the ones you listed are 240pins which are for desktops)

 

sdram memory is for desktops.
fb-dimms are for servers, this is why the memory is so expensive.
sodimm memory is for laptops.

SO you do not make a mistake, I will give you some links to a 2 x 2gb memory pair which will work with your laptop.

You can pick any of these three memory kits, all are good.

Here is a 4gb kit by Great Skill:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231135

here is a 4gb kit by Corsair:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145193

here is a 4gb kit by Kingston:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134605

Just so you know, for the harddrive, you are looking to get one of these:
Samsung 320gb 5400rpm laptop drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152111

Western Digital 320gb 5400rpm drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136197

K-TRON

 

Basically, if I could kiss you guys, I would. This thread has been bookmarked by me, and I hope I get to order these parts soon! I figure I'll spring for both upgrades as soon as my hdd gets around 90% full.

Thanks again, K-TRON and emporiumboutique!