I need to buy a 2nd HDD for 8760w. I need some advice, please.

Hi,

I have an HP 8760w with the 256GB SSD and no HDD or SSD in the secondary drive bay. I am running out of storage space so I would like to purchase a generic 2,5" hard drive instead of from the overpriced local HP parts supplier (I'm from South Africa). I have three questions:

1. Do I need a special 2,5" hard drive to work with this machine or can I just go to my local shop and get a regular seagate/WD 7200RPM 2,5" hard drive? A friend told me that I need a hard drive with a specific data transfer rate. Is this true?

2. Where can I get the hard drive enclosure/chassis to fit the hard drive into before placing it in the machine? Do I need a special chassis or can I get a generic HP one? I have an old 8710w with a spare HDD enclosure.

3. Are there any other things I have to take notice of before I buy an additional hard drive?

Thanks for the advice!

 

any 2,5" SATA drive which physically fits (I think even 12mm works but this is only an assumption) should do it, transfer rate is not that important since you are only storing data but of course the faster the better

the HDD enclosure is new since the 8760w so 8740w or older (8730w,8710w) do not work.

I found the cheapest way to buy one of the special enclosure is not always ebay but the HP part store. You can look up the part number in the Maintenance guide if you don't have it

 

Ok great, thanks!

Also, I forgot to ask. My friend said i should get a hard drive with SATA 3/6 seeing that I already have an SSD in the machine. What is a SATA 3/6 and how does it affect the SSD and HDD in a machine? And is it really necessary to get a SATA 3/6 hard drive for this 8760w's second hard drive?

 

I have not much experience with SATA III but I don't think it will slow down the SSD in slot 0 if you have a SATA I in slot 1.

The problem is more that normal hard disks cannot reach that high transfer rates and so even a SATA I hard disk should work fast enough, however, new hard disks support SATA III e. g. Hitachi Travelstar Z7K500 Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

You can read more about SATA here Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Or maybe someone else knows more about this?

 

Do you perhaps know if the 8760w is compatible with SATA 3.0 - 6 Gbit/s or SATA 2.0 - 3 Gbit/s?

I checked the 8760w manual and it only mentions SATA and a transfer rate of 100mb/s for the HDD and doesn't give any specifications for the SSD. It doesn't mention anything about SATA 2 or 3.

 

sorry, I don't know, however, all drives will work but maybe you get not the maximum transfer rate.

So, you can use a SATA 3 drive with a SATA 2 connector in the notebook, this is no problem.

In my 8730w, which is much older, I use a SATA 3 SSD and a SATA 2 HDD without any problem but of course the SSD reaches not the maximum possible transfer rates.

 

you can measure your actual SSD transfer rates with the specific SSD tool (magician for samsung e. g.) and if it is a lot more than 300 MB/s it is SATA III, I guess.

 

The 8760W has SATAIII ports, whether your drive will saturate those ports or not is a different question.

What I'd be more annoyed about here is the fact that you will probably need to open up the laptop, remove the speaker assembly and cut off part of the speaker assembly which effectively blocks the secondary hard drive bay, in order to actually install anything in the secondary internal bay. See this post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...ebook-8760w-owners-lounge-26.html#post7830395

This guy seemed to manage it without removing the speaker assembly, but I found it near impossible to do otherwise.

So if you don't want to take a knife to your shiny Elitebook, probably best to install the new HDD in the optical bay. You might also want to check if your secondary bay is obstructed first by simply trying to fit anything in it (whilst the unit is off of course, and even without the HDD cage).