HDD/SDD Upgrade for a N150 Netbook ...

Yes some may call me crazy ... the HDD (250GB 5400 rpm) on my N150 netbook seems to be nearing the end ... but otherwise the netbook is still going strong, great battery life, and very very silent ... It has been with me in Amazon regions for about 5 months in all and has never given up on me despite heat, humidity, more heat ... amazing really.

So I am now thinking of putting in a Seagate Momentus Hybrid Drive, the 750GB variety, to make the netbook much snappier and have plenty of space to take movies etc and to put on many sound files ... Will this drive work or produce too much heat ? Better a 256GB SSD or 521 SSD (too expensive). And also do I just clone the current HDD with Acronis ? Any advice ... thanks

 

First double-check the model number and thickness of the current HDD. It is probably 9.5mm but might be one of the slimmer 7mm drives. I doubt if the Momentus has a significantly different power consumption than a normal HDD. You can make a comparison using the charts such as this at Tom's Hardware. However, I would be tempted to go down the SSD route - even the cheapest is likely to be enough for a netbook and will be less vulnerable to the high humidity but a backup drive is useful to have around. For the latter the 64GB flash drives are getting cheaper by the day. 1.8" HDDs are also very portable but are no longer in production.

John

 

John as always thank you for the quick reply ... Well yes I do need space but indeed flash cards are getting cheaper. My Itunes library takes up a lot of space, listen to a lot of audio interviews on many subjects when I am out in the jungle. I guess a 256 GB SSD + 64GB flash would do the trick. But of course never going to get SATA III speeds with the netbook motherboard. Any recommendations re SSD for this N150. What about the CRUCIAL 256GD SSD V4 series (slower cousin of the M4 series). Also I guess 2GB RAM is max for this format. I really love the screen on this N150 always have, best ever of many laptops ... Sometimes I wish I could build a new netbook from this shell LOL just to keep the screen and have a bit more power but not more heat, since it is also a very silent machine (never understood how HP Mini owners put up with that AWFUL fan noise many of those have). By the by are there any new Samsung netbooks lately ? Or worthy of looking at ?

 

1. I'm using a Crucial M4 mSATA SSD and it seems to be well behaved. Firmware upgrades don't wipe the SSD (unlike some brands) although it is recommended to make a backup first. I would expect the V4 ti be equally well-behaved. An alternative could be the Samsung 840 (normal version, not the faster 840 Pro).

2. Netbooks seem to have been squeezed out between tablets and ultrabooks with only a few left-overs and refurbished models left in the retail chain. Manufacturers seem to think we all have a connection to "the cloud" and don't need much local storage.

John

 

Yes and some of us like myself who are sensitive to WIFI technology cannot work on tablets since no ethernet ports. Read up on that Hybrid drive and looks like it makes too much noise and some heat, so no good. I think a 256 GB Crucial V4 series may do the trick. By the way if I put a clean install of W7 on it will it automatically detect and install drivers or do I have to do it manually ... or is there a way of backing them up ? All the content has been backed up. I see that of my 250GB only 201 is available ... where does the other 49GB go to ? W7 Starter cannot be that big? Yes shame netbooks are going out of fashion .... the Macbook Air 11 inches is looking better by the day but battery life so so and don;t like the OS

 

1. An advertised 250GB is actually about 233GB because the manufacturers assume Giga is 10^9 whereas computers use Giga = 1024^3.
2. Unless you have removed it the HDD will contain a recovery partition which may be around 20GB. You can see this partition in Disk Management. If you copy this partition to the new drive using cloning software then you can use F4 at the BIOS screen to load the factory image of Windows from the recovery partition. However, if you have cloned the disc there is no need to reinstall Windows unless you want a clean installation.
3. Alternatively, you can install Windows from a disc and then (I think) use the Samsung Update Plus software to identify and download the required drivers and software.
4. Samsung did make an 11" 1st generation Series 9 but the smallest in the current range is 13".

John