Are my notebook hard disks upgradeable?

I am having an HP Pavilion dv9312tx having 240 GB total(2X120 GB) hard disk space. What is the maximum amount of hard disk space I can get after upgradation? Is it upgradeable at all?

 

of course. The HP website has it at 640 (320x2) but I think 1TB will be fine. My friend did that and it worked like normal.

 

For 1TB, I have to get 2 500GB hard disks right? So which manufacturer do you recommend? Will the BIOS recognise it? I have heard elsewhere that if we change the hard disks I might have to reactivate my Vista installation. Is this true?

 

Since you are swapping in empty hard drives you need to reinstall operating system on the empty disk and yes, it will need activation. It should not have any difficulties since no other hardware has changed.

On the other hand, if you use disk cloning you can clone the old OS drive to the new one. That would save you the trouble of reinstalling everything.

I used the trial version of Acronis Trueimage on my mother's computer to swap in bigger hdd ( http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/ ) 15 days is enough time for that It is simple to do on your laptop, since you can have 2 hard drives at the same time, just swap the drives few times so all the data is copied.

 

Thanks a lot on that info. So which hard disk vendor to opt for? I presume they will be of 2.5 inch,isn't it?

 

You can go with Seagate, Toshiba or Fuji. I've used all of those and they work very nicely.

 

If I had some extra cash right now, I'd go for Hitachi 5K320 ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=246116) as a main OS drive and then a nice 500GB ( http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/500gb-notebook-hdd,1960.html) as a storage drive.

But recently WD has kicked out nice Scorpio Black drives at 320GB ( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=477) and they might also be a good alternative as main OS drive, depending on their performance against Hitachi. Haven't seen a review/comparison yet.

Drives do not need to be identical, if possible opt for fast but more expensive main drive and slower but bigger and cheaper second drive. It's better than two mediocre drives.

 

But the primary problem still remains. What is the maximum hard disk capacity I can put into it? My model dv9312(945PM chipset) is of March 2007 make. Even in case of RAM ,its maximum was only 2 GB but after I flashed the BIOS,it increased to 4GB. So without verifying the exact maximum capacity installable on it, it would be very risky to buy two 320 GB HDDs and later on finding out they are not supported. I contacted HP support. They sent me a mail saying that I will be contacted. But no call or mail has come. Is there any utility tool to find out the max. HDD capacity? Or is there anybody who has upgraded their similar PC model?

 

I have a scorpio black 320gb on my dv6700t and it has space for one hard drive, so yours should be able to hold two of those and they are selling them on hp with 2x320gb hdd so I think that you will be fine, and there should not be a problem to add the 500gb one.

 

I went to seagate's website. The maximum capacity of notebook HDD they offer is 320 GB. Which manufacturer offers 500 GB?

 

Samsung Spinpoint H6: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/500gb-notebook-hdd,1960-5.html

Hitachi Travelstar 5K500:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/500gb-notebook-hdd,1960-3.html

 

Ha Ha,please take a look at this email snapshot I received from HP Support this evening. I can't believe it.

 

Trust me, ive seen worst advice than that from HP.

 

Those are the two best for 500GB at the moment, Toshiba just sucks, Fujitsu is alright.
Westen Digital would be on the top of my list, but they don't have a 500GB right now.