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To find the best laptop hard drive, first check the type of drive your laptop supports in the manual or online. Note the capacity your BIOS chipset will support and check for updates. Determine the interface required and shop for the desired specs. Consider onboard cache and RPM, and read customer reviews for noise and heat. Back up your current drive before transitioning to the new one and safely clean the old unit before selling or giving it away.
As applications have become more powerful and video and music libraries have become commonplace on the average computer, you may find yourself looking for a larger or faster drive. How do you find the best laptop hard drive for your computer?
First determine the type of drive your laptop supports. This information is available in your computer manual. If you no longer have the manual, you can probably find one online by entering the model into a search engine, along with “+manual,” as in “Model +manual” minus the quotes.
The BIOS chipset on your computer will only support drives up to a certain capacity, so you’ll want to make note of how many gigabytes (GB) your computer will support. If you find that the machine only supports a small laptop hard drive, check the manufacturer’s website to see if there is a BIOS or firmware update that will allow the machine to support larger capacity drives. Flashing the BIOS – the term used to update it – is a simple but critical process that must be done exactly as directed or the machine could become unbootable, so be extra careful when doing this.
In the manual you can also check what kind of interface your laptop’s hard drive requires. Does your computer support the older IDE interface or the newer SATA interface? If SATA, is it SATA Gen 1 or SATA II? They are sometimes listed as SATA/150 and SATA/300 respectively. If your laptop supports SATA Gen 1, it may still require a SATA II drive, but it will only run at the original SATA speeds.
Once you have the specs you can start shopping. Enter the type of laptop hard drive you want into a search engine or your favorite website for bargain buyers. For example, you could enter “120GB portable IDE drive” or “250GB SATA II portable”. When examining the results, notice that drives with more onboard cache are faster than drives with less, all other things being equal.
Another factor to keep an eye on is the RPM or RPM (revolutions per minute) specification. For example, among SATA drives you can find the same model in a 5400 or 7200 flavor. The 7200 will have faster read times and be slightly more expensive than its 5400 counterpart. matter of personal opinion.
The fastest drives available may produce more heat and noise than their slightly slower counterparts, although this is not a hard and fast rule because technology is constantly evolving. If a completely silent laptop hard drive is important to you, however, read customer reviews before deciding on a model.
Back up your current drive using imaging or cloning software to help you transition to the new drive. If you plan to sell your old unit or give it away, be sure to clean it safely. Simply deleting partitions is no longer considered safe, as freely available tools can restore deleted partitions and make data recoverable.
