To those who have upgraded their HDD on a HP laptop.

I am currently in the market for an upgrade on my current 80gb hdd. I've only had my rig for about three months but I'm going to start school in a few months and I'm thinking about getting a 120gb or more HDD. The thing that puzzles me is that I want to get a 7200rpm drive but I'm afraid that I will lose a substantial amount of battery time. So this is where you guys come in. I want to know how much of a difference if any an hdd w/ higher revs does to a battery. I currently have the setup (in my signature) running some construction design software on a 12 cell battery, that only lasts about 3 hours. This is good enough for now. I just need to know what impact my upgrade will cause. Also if any body could let me know of a nice HDD that will my preferences. Thanks,
M.R.

 

The faster drive will prolly cost you a few minutes of battery life at the most, unless you do heavy copying and whatnot where the hard drive is accessed fully for a long period of time.

 

I updated to the Hitachi 200gb 7200rpm drive and couldnt be happier. I still get good battery life and it is much faster than my 160gb 5400rpm drive. I recommend it.

 

I am missing at MOST 10 minutes of battery time... I absolutely LOVE the speed increase though - its totally worth it.

I had a 80gb 5400rpm that came with and I swapped for the 200gb hitachi and everything is so much faster. Its probably the most worthwhile mod I could have done...

 

not to hijack this thread but i've already bought my 200gb 7200rpm hard drive to replace my current 120gb 5400rpm hard drive but i have not been able to find a "guide" of how to get this done. I already cloned the disks but i dont know how to physically do the switch. Any help would be appreciated

//Alex//

 

Avillabon,

On the bottom of your laptop you will see a compartment that will have a picture of 3 disks stacked on top of one another. This is where the HDD goes. Now remember, the dv9500t has 2 HDD compartments, so make sure you change the right one. I personally don't know which compartment is the main HDD, but I would believe that it is marked on the compartment. Anyways, after you unscrew the 2 screws on the compartment lid you will see the HDD and it is pretty straight forward. It even has directions on how to pull it out, but basically there is a tab there that you pull on and you will slide the HDD out. After that, you need to take the adapter off of the HDD, connect it onto the new HDD (it is just a connecter that converts the SATA connector on the HDD to HP's motherboard) and take off the enclosure on the old HDD and put install it onto the new HDD as well. Then slide the new HDD in and put the compartment cover back on.

You can find the repair manual guide here:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/manualCategory?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=3369393&lang=en&

If you have more questions let me know and I'd be able to help better.

 

thanks envision! worked perfectly!!!

//Alex//