Upgrading a Laptop HDD

[ShinyF1]

I have a three year old Samsung SF310 laptop which is perfectly adequate for my needs EXCEPT for HDD capacity.

It has a 320GB harddrive - a standard SATA 5400rpm Hitachi Travelstar from what I can make out, connected to a an "Intel HM55 chipset" which I guess is the motherboard.

I assumed that with the right cloning software I could swap the HDD out for a similar sized but higher capacity drive - 500GB would suffice. I called Samsung to check what the limitations were as far as storage capacity and drive thickness [7mm/10mm etc], and they say that "the motherboard will not even recognise an HDD that has greater than 320GB capacity".

This has me confused, as there are retailers online that show higher capacity drives [HDD and SSD] as being compatible with the machine. Are Samsung just being awkward to distance themselves from any warranty liability?

Any help appreciated

Thanks

Sean

 

[Sp!ke]

I would question why you need more than 320GB of storage on a laptop. Laptop drives are fragile and prone to failure. If you are running out of space on a 320gb drive then you are clearly using this as a storage medium rather than just as a tool.

My advice is to store your data on something more robust, a static desktop PC (with a network share) or NAS box or something designed for the task and not use any laptop to store precious data.

... and whatever you use, backup furiously.

 

[ShinyF1]

I would question why you need more than 320GB of storage on a laptop. Laptop drives are fragile and prone to failure. If you are running out of space on a 320gb drive then you are clearly using this as a storage medium rather than just as a tool.

My advice is to store your data on something more robust, a static desktop PC (with a network share) or NAS box or something designed for the task and not use any laptop to store precious data.

... and whatever you use, backup furiously.

I have a 1TB drive attached to the router which serves as the backup location where important and shared items (pictures/films/music) are stored. It is accessible remotely (but slowly) through FTP and HTTPS addresses.

I keep cleaning up the laptop, but use it for the backup process (and move them to the NAS via a wired connection rather than backup straight to the NAS which is painfully slow) so the secondary partition gets full very quickly.

I'm sure I'm not doing all of this in the best way possible..

The ulterior motive is also to upgrade an old macbook 3,1 which I have bounced to my daughter - it only has an 80GB HDD, so I thought upgrade mine to 500GB, and pop the 320GB from mine into the Macbook, killing two birds with one stone. Drive spec requirements for both are the same so I thought this would work OK?

Or am I continuing to be delusional....

 

[danieljames]

Some laptops/desktops are limited in the capacity of drive they support, however this is normally overcome by a firmware/bios update. Check on the manufacturers website for a updated BIOS.

http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/NP-SF310-S01US

I would be surprised if a 512GB drive doesn’t work but you never can tell for sure without trying it. An SSD drive would greatly improve the performance if budget would allow.

 

[Rory]

I've never heard of the drive capacity being limited and it sounds unlikely to me, even more so with SATA. Note this doesn't mean it's impossible, just that I've never heard it!

The agree that 320GB is pretty big for a laptop. I did have one that size in my current laptop but switched to SSD and thought 256MB was more than enough, and I just looked and there's 115GB free. This is mainly a business laptop, plus a few photos though, so it's not crammed with massive videos etc.

When I've swapped HDDs I've always used a paid-for version of Acronis True Image to clone the drive. Many drive manufacturers have a free version though. The biggest issue I've found is connected the second drive to clone them - some just won't work in some caddies. In my ThinkPad there's a "shell" which takes a second drive and plugs into the space left by sliding out the removeable CD Drive. I've found that's worked with every HDD I've tried.

I do copy (I hesitate to use the word back-up as IT pros would have a fit!) mine to a NAS every night, also using Acronis True Image. The initial copy does take a very long time, but the daily increments take about 10 mins. That's on a wired connection, the machine sits in a docking station and the copy is set to happen at our usual evening meal time.

 

[Sp!ke]

Windows is about 14Gb, maximum of another 30Gb of apps on top of that lets say. meaning you have in excess of 250Gb of data on your laptop! do you really need it on your laptop if you also have it on a NAS? 250GB is a HUGE amount of data unless you are storing an entire music or movie collection or something.

 

[Deleted member 65149]

I can't answer the OP's question, but I can say that I've just replaced the 750GB Hard Drive in my Dell laptop (old drive failed ). It's the same size as the original Samsung drive, but this time a Seagate 7200 RPM Hybrid Drive with a big chunk of solid state drive (SSD). The SSD combined with adaptive memory (learns what you use the most) makes booting and common file opening bloomin fast!

(BTW, I don't need anything like the 750GB, but felt safer replacing like for like size.)

 

[ShinyF1]

Sprin***eaning as we speak - have found a few storage hungry things that slipped back in as part of a full Samsung system rebuild. Cyberlink DVD Suite at 1GB+ etc etc

MS Office Pro and Outlook mail archives going back a few years are the largest bit of occupied space, although iTunes and its habit of dumping things locally when it can't see the NAS is a bit of a pain