upgrade a cf-18 mk4 hdd

Does anyone know how large a hard drive I can put in to my CF-18 MK4 digitizer tablet without upgrading any other components?

 

I went with the Samsung 160GB drive. You really don't want to go to bigger because you will end up slowing it down .
You must remember that you only have a single core 1.2MHz which you can not upgrade. The max your memory can go is 1.5GB so its no power house. You start loading up the HDD performance will go way down.

 

THANKS! I was wondering where the slow down point would be.

 

I guess you could say " Been there, done that" My drive is about 30% full and runs great.

 

I went with a WD Blue 250GB in my MK5. Mainly because thats all that Best Buy had in the way of PATA drives. And I'm very happy with the result. I diddn't notice a drop in speed.

 

The drop in speed I was talking about was when you start adding big programs and the hard drive starts hitting 40-50% full. You will see it then .

 

40-50%? Don't you think your HDD can't rotate fast enough because info is too heavy? ))
There is no any relation between HDD fillness and system performance.
Of course if your drive is almost 100% full - system will slow down.
The bigger drive you use - the better (faster).
Max is 320GB, but they are rare and expensive, so just install 160/250GB and be happy. Don't buy 7200RPM - 5400 is enough and better for battery life.

Big programs only make Windows slow when they are running or making incorrect registry changes.


(pardon for my English)

 

To get the highest performance on larger drives you need to defragment them on a regular basis as data gets placed all over the drive

It's a good idea to short stroke them as well by partitioning the drive in two and installing the operating system on the first partition and using the second partition for storage

I partition 160gb and larger drives

I back up on optical media (dvd's) on a regular basis as I don't trust hard drive reliability to much

Hard drives are the first thing that will fail in your Toughbook

I have replaced three hard drives in the last month

One drive had less than 1000hrs,18 months old
The others were around 6 years old drives with 3500hrs/6700hrs

 

Sorry, I have to ask. Do you have an original HDD caddy?
It's strange HDDs die so often.
I've sold many of 18's and none of them had problems with HDD. Though we use them in offroad, so vibrations and shocks are permanent.
Maybe it was a factory problem with HDDs.

In any case "the first thing that will fail in your Toughbook" is it's darn", it's really unreliable) touchscreen ))

Defragmentation is a must on all HDD's. Partioning is just user customization.

 

Yes all my Toughbooks have original caddies

And yes for the drive that had 1000hr's (500GB Seagate sata) it would be a defect from the factory, The other drives 2-40 gb hitachi 4200rpm died from old age


One of the other members here had a 3 month old Samsung 160GB die in 3 months ,in that case its a defect from the factory

Agree with you on the Touchscreen ,In hindsight the touchscreen is the first to fail ,with the hard drive second

 

Seeking time on a higher Hdd are much more than to an average hdd considering with the same rpm. We are talking here a mil..seconds. If you can computed by electrical transient.


ohlip