X40/X41 Hard drive upgrade?

My EPP page has many "openbay" X-series notebooks - no hard drive installed.

If I buy one of these, is it possible to put a third-party 5400 or 7200 rpm drive in there?

 

x40/41 use 1.8 hard drives which only come in 4200RPM speed. If you are looking for a smaller ThinkPad, the x32 which I believe uses a standard hard drive. Good Luck.

 

Ah - so they do. Pity.

I'm replacing an old Sony R505 ultraportable (2.6 lbs) that uses a 2.5" drive, so I just presumed the IBM does too. And since I've gotten used to such a small notebook, I was hoping not to go to X30, which is nearly 20% heavier.

 

The x41 doesn't have good battery life with the standard battery like 2-2.5 hours so you have to add the larger one for more time which makes it close in weight to the x32. The x32 also uses regular Dothan Pentium Ms rather than the ULV one in the x41.

 

Is there a performance difference?

 

Check out this article with a link to a bunch of reviews for the X series:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2439

With a faster hard drive possible in the X32 you'll get a slower processor but potentially faster overall performance with the increased RPM drive.

 

The ULV only go upto 1.5 Ghz while the Dothans can be had up to 2Ghz. The ULV's run very low voltages which is good for battery life. If all you are doing is office and surfing, I doubt you'd notice much of a difference. The hard drive is whats gonna kill performance.

 

There is one catch though about going with the ULV. As you may know, many if not all of the regular Pentium M's can be undervolted to a much lower level and still run stably. I won't dwell into this topic, as it's been discussed a lot before, but it basically increases the efficiency to close to that of the ULV's (or even better), while preserving performance. I won't say that this is ethical, though, just that it's possible and easy.