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eliwil

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Replacing original HDD on old laptop, power issues?

I'm swapping out the 40 GB HDD on my year old Toshiba Satellite A65 laptop with a 100 GB. I'd like to replace the original 10 GB HDD in my prehistoric IBM ThinkPad 390E with that 40 GB HDD that I pull out.

Before I do, I'd like to make sure that that I'm not overloading the system with something that's going to suck a lot more power than the old 10 HDD required. My assumption is that the power requirements are holding steady or declining even tho the storage capacity is increasing. But, that's not even an educated guess.

So, if it were you, would you feel reasonably comfortable making replacing the 10 GB HDD with the 40?

E
Avatar of tfjeff
tfjeff

honestly I wouldn't imagine different notebook drives would differ too much in power consumption (however, a hard drive with a 4.2k rotational speed may consume slightly less power than a 7.2k drive).  However, this isn't a question I feel very confident in answering as I don't really have any sources to back me up. So I have posted a pointer question in the laptops/notebooks TA for you.
jeff
thanks x86
I've placed MANY larger drives in older systems.

The 40GB drive will not be a problem in regards to power consumption.  The power requirements of a 40GB laptop harddrive are approximately 5 Watts on spin-up, and about 2.5 Watts for seek/read/write.  The older 10GB drive will be equivalent to this power draw.

Here is a link that you can use to confirm my facts:  http://www.directron.com/mp0402h.html
I forgot to post the specs on a 10GB drive:  http://www.netcomdirect.com/tomk10212noh.html

The seek/read/write draw for the 10GB drive is .1w less, which is nothing considering it is a different manufacturer (the 10GB specs are a Toshiba, while the 40GB drive was a Samsung).

Spin-up is 2 Watts higher, but at 5VDC this is really a trivial increase.  (The 2 Watt increase amounts to .34 amps higher draw...only on startup).

I'm only giving you these specs to ease your concerns...you really have nothing to worry about!
Avatar of rindi
The power consumption won't be a problem, but you might be getting problems with the BIOS of your old laptop. A lot of old laptop BIOS's don't recognize large disks. I think the 390e should work with it but you will probably have to update the BIOS.
to backup rindi, look here for drive size barriers :

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm
If the bios recognizes a 10GB drive, the 40GB size will not be an issue.
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tuneupmypc

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