One limitation with used laptops is hard drive capacity. Laptops lag behind desktops by a wide margin, but the good news is you can upgrade your used laptops hard drive.

A new larger capacity hard drive will improve system performance, allow more applications to be installed and of course, let you store much more music to listen to on the road.

I would recommend only upgrading your laptops hard drive if it was made in 1999 or later. Laptops over 4 years old often have annoying limitations that can sometimes be worked around but there are no guarantees.

If your current laptop has around 6GB of hard disk at the moment you can easily and cheaply upgrade to 40GB or more. Most Pentium II laptops are limited to 40GB so I wouldn’t recommend getting hard drive over 40GB unless you’ve read about successful upgrades over 40GB for your laptop model on the Internet.

Since there are quite a few options in buying hard drives for used laptops I’ve written this article as a buyer’s guide so you know what hard drive to go out and buy. The technical guide to physically installing the drive will be covered in next article.

The right hard drive for your used laptop

There are two basic types of laptop hard drives based on their thickness. A few old laptops use 12.5mm while by far the majority (and all new latops) use 9.5mm. A laptop that takes a 12.5mm drive can be upgraded to a 9.5 mm hard drive, so there is no real need to worry about this.

As I said before, I think your best bet is to get a 9.5mm, 40GB hard drive, but if you have a laptop made in the last two years you can go up 80GB or more with no problems.

This is what a laptop hard drive looks like

Laptops like desktops have used the same IDE interface for years, so there’s no problem with interface compatibility. However some systems have bios limitations that won’t allow the system to address drive of certain sizes.

Some very old (pre 1998) used laptop computers are limited to accessing hard drives with a capacity of 8.4GB or less (7.9GB on some systems). 3rd party software is available that breaks the “capacity barrier”. For Windows 98, ME and 2000 use Disk Manager™ DiskGo by Ontrack. However if your current notebook hard drive is already bigger than 8.4GB, then you have no problem to replace it with any drive up to 40gb, and no extra software is required.

It’s unlikely but also possible your system may suffer from a 32GB Barrier. Some BIOSs released before June 1999 stall with drives larger than 32GB. If you are installing a drive larger than 32GB and your system stalls before floppy or drive boot can take place, you may have a system BIOS that is incompatible with larger drives.

The best solution is to contact your system manufacturer for a BIOS upgrade. Basically you need to flash your bios to the latest version, go to your laptop manufacturer’s web site and search for downloads for you laptop model. Since by far the majority of laptops released around time were compatible with Windows 2000 you shouldn’t suffer from this problem or if you do, there should be a bios flash to allow your laptop to support Windows 2000 available. Another option if you are using Windows 98/ME is to use Data Lifeguard Tools 10 to install your drive.

Laptop hard drive speed

One important consideration is the speed of your laptop hard drive. The speed of a laptop hard drive is dependant upon the rotational speed of the platters (either 4200, 5400 or 7200 rpm) and the amount of disk buffer cache (either 2mb, 8mb or 16mb). The faster the rotation, the faster the access time and large caches help when you’re dealing with large files such as video or audio editing. It should also be said that larger capacity drives are always faster since, as the density of the data on the platters increases, the access time gets faster.

Almost all old laptop drives are 4200rpm with a 512kb or 2mb buffer. Upgrading to a 40GB, 5400 rpm drive with an 8MB buffer will give your used laptop a huge performance boost. Applications will boot much faster and since Windows uses the hard disk extensively for the memory swap file, your entire system will be much more responsive.

I should point out that upgrading your systems memory is actually a much better way of improving performance and I suggest you do that before you look to upgrade your hard drive solely to increase system speed.

Currently 40GB, 5400 rpm drives are the best value so I suggest you buy one of these, there are faster laptop hard drives on the market but these 40GB drives are the best bang for your buck.

That about wraps this guide up. Hope it was useful! If you want technical details on actually installing a new hard drive in your used laptop, have a look at our hard drive upgrade guide.