Maximum hard drive size in an early CF-51 Mark I?

I have an early CF-51 that I was thinking of adding a 500 meg drive or so to use as a small work station - audio server. Anyone know how hard it is to put that size a drive or larger and have it recognized without going through massive hoops? Thanks in advance to the brain trust

 

I'm guessing it's ide, so a wd3200beve 320gb will fit in that caddy, but check on fleabay for the core duo laptops with the t2300 or t2500? cpu that can be bought without the caddy for 90.00 bucks there-abouts and you can get into these easy and upgrade the cpu to a core-2-duo cpu slap in the T7200 cpu for a real cost effective fast laptop. toughasnails, rusty503 and a bunch of others have done this. it'll go up to a T7600 cpu but costs a bit more to do this for only 8-10% performance gain? spend it on more ram. a good samsung 160gb ide 2.5" drive is usually found for 60.00 range and is a solid drive. have done this on quite a few cf-51's with single core and core duo's. maybe some of the other guys will drop in and give some other suggestions that you can do..Driller

 

I meant to do that and never got around to it. I have a dual core CF51 that I'm actively using and the older single core. 320gb would probably be fine for what I need. Just figured if 500 would fit, why not!

 

I just grabbed one. Not the best deal but I grabbed it anyway. $100 but it's missing just about everything. Any write ups here on taking the case apart to move pieces around? Says the wifi card is missing which I find a bit bizarre.

 

probably was a federal unit and should have the antenna already there.(3195 wifi card) look up early postings for toughasnails, rusty503, myself and you'll find quite a bit of info on the cf-51 core duos. they aren't as tough as the cf-29's or cf-30's but usually are a lot faster. these units are not hard at all to take apart, usually when you remove the keyboard you'll start to see where you need to remove the screws and the top where speakers are and you can get to the cpu where you can see where heat sink is with 4screws and heat pads,then you lever type remove the locking mechanism to remove the cpu to swap out for a T7200 for the biggest bang for your buck. in no time you'll be a pro at disassembling and reassembling these. just take your time lay out and aside area to put back things as taken out. a picture before helps to put all back together. remove battery, hard disk caddy no power supply. it really is a lot of fun..Driller

 

Driller is right these things are very easy to work on...about 15-20 minutes to upgrade the cpu and thats blind folded

 

Wait, the MK 1 is not dual core and you cannot upgrade to the Core 2 Duo. It uses the Pentium M processor. While it can be upgraded you must stay with the Pentium M line. The MK 3 is the only version that you can upgrade the processor to a Core 2 Duo processor.

As for HDD size, the drive interface is IDE and the largest I have found in 2.5" IDE is 320GB. That would be the one that Driller mentioned above.

 

Has anyone put an SSD drive in these things? I'm not thinking about the original question for the old CF-51 but for my primary dual core machine. If I'm going to be moving and swapping stuff around now might be the time to make the change. I would think that would speed things up nicely.

 

Missed this before but I knew that. I'm not sure what I'm going to put where yet. The one I just bought has a faster processor and seemingly different vid card than my current dual core. However I went through serious hell to get this vid card to display wide screen format so I'm not sure I want a different vid card anyway. So what I do will depend on the video card really. If I'm NOT going to worry about video then I'll just swap the larger processor to my main machine and then scavenge from the single core machine to get the dual core machine working. Don't know if I can pull the wifi from the single core and put it into the dual core but if I can that's what I'd do. If all that works Then all and all it will have been an OK deal. $100 to upgrade my main machine and get a 2nd working dual core out of the deal.

It would not kill me to have three of these. One each for myself and my wife and a 3rd running XP as the glorified NAS and for the occasional utilities that I still need XP for.

 

How about listing the model numbers. It sounds like you have a MK3 and a MK3LL.

As for the WiFi card in your MK3, you can go with an Intel 3945, 4965 or 5100 card. If you do go with the last 2 you will have to do the "Pin 20" mod. Actually you have quite a selection of cards you can use and almost always have to do the mod. Search eBay and you can find these cards pretty cheap. A very quick search turned up a 4965 for $6.95 shipped. Both the 4965 and 5100 will give you Wireless-N capability.

If I remember correctly, the cards from the MK1 and MK2 are different formats compared to the MK3 cards and are not swappable. The MK 1 and 2 uses Mini-PCI cards where the MK 3 uses Mini-PCIe cards.

 

OK I'll post once I get the "new" one and see which one it actually is. I'm pretty sure the one I'm using is a MK3LL. Not sure what the one coming is. I'm pretty sure I'll end up needing a hard drive though. So I'll have to decide SSD or standard.

 

The easiest way to tell is to go into BIOS and look at the BIOS version. If it shows as V3.xx you have a MK 3 and if it show V3.5x you have a MK3LL.

 

don't think you can swap the video"card" as it is surface mounted to the MB. the Mk3 usually has video ram that is listed in bios(mostly saw 256mb some higher up to 512mb?), with a model cf-51QEE---(bios version 3.00) or something like that. I really think they actually are a higher end version of the core duo cf-51's cause the original cost was more than the Mk3LL(with bios version3.5) may be wrong here but don't think so. didn't know about the wifi upgrade here with greater than 3495 card to the other ones rusty mentioned which will require a pin mod? good news to me here, thanks guys..Driller

 

I have used both the 4965 and the 5100 with great success. Again, you have to do the "Pin 20" mod but that is pretty easy. Using either card is a low cost way to get Wireless-N. If you do go for the 5100 remember to get the full size version. The half size version will not fit unless you get an adapter for it.

The MK3 has a greater screen resolution than the MK3LL. On the MK3 it is 1600 x 1200 (UXGA) and 1024x768 (XGA) on the MK3LL