Hard drive upgrade on 532h?

Hello out there!

I recently ordered a 532h from Amazon and it should be arriving in a couple days. It will come with a 160GB hard drive. Has anyone upgraded their stock drive to something bigger? I am concerned about power consumption and heat. Amazon has 2.5" drives that go up to as high as 640GB.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-S ... 737&sr=1-4

What make/model hard drive is in the 532h to start with?

The extra space would be used to store my photos and videos when I travel. I would love to hear your upgrade experiences.

-- Boris

 

Not sure what the 532 has but my 150 has a WD sata disk so probably also WD. The 640Gb is a good upgrade choice as it is a 5400 rpm disk (quieter than a 7200rpm) and according to WD all disks from 120 GB up have the same power consumption so it will not affect battery performance. Do not be tempted by the bigger capacity disks as they are thicker, and even if you could squeeze them in they would restrict air flow.

However opening the machine is not easy and could invalidate your warranty so have you considered your options. On my 150 running an enhanced linpus OS the disk is only 4% full. There are a number of usb connected credit card sized hard drives about, and by the time you fill the original disk very large capacity SD card disks will be reasonably priced. Kingston, and others, produce high speed microSD cards which come with a usb carrier and are so small they fit flush in a usb slot and have a loop of string to pull them out. Also several free email providers also provide free on-line storage. It is worth having one of these accounts just for the occasional storage capacity.

 

The 532h has a door for memory RAM, Hard Disk and PCI-E on the back of the unit. A few screws and you can access everything easily. No need to take apart all the netbook. Just open the door and slip a new hard drive...

 

I want to avoid external drives while on the go because that is extra bulk to carry. External drives are great at home for backing up files and I have a few of those kicking around for that purpose. Solid state storage would be great but is too expensive ($$ per GB) compared to a larger internal drive.

I was wondering if the BIOS setup has any limits to the size and characteristics of the hard drive it can detect and work with. It's been years since I puddled around with this sort of stuff. I remember entering the number of logical heads, cylinders, etc into my old AMI BIOS setup.

-- Boris

 

Not sure if theres any bios restrictions. We haven't hit that point yet if there is. I'm fairly sure it will support at least 1TB.
In Windows 7 the max is 2TB if you use MBR, if you switch to GPT, you can use >256TB.

 

Even if the BIOS had a setting limit, which I doubt, you can always format a bigger disk into multiple partitions and mount them as individual drives. Create a set at the start of the drive that match what you have on your existing drive, and then partition the rest of the disk into 250Gb chunks or so. If you store big data files (mpeg videos, etc) on the last partition then performance will improve a little.

 

I have the AO532h and I have replaced the 160gb hard drive with a 500gb Seagate drive. No problems what so ever and it draws less power than the 160gb did. At least according to the drive specs anyway. I have noticed no difference either way on the amount of battery run time. Heat doesn't seem to have changed much either! However, I have noticed a positive difference in preformance.

 

I put an Intel X25 into my 532H and it screams. Downside, is that it is actually less storage (80GB). The upside - is my system boots in about 10 seconds, and runs apps with a lot less drag. The X25 can be picked up for ~ $200 at Newegg these days. You need to see / use a netbook hopped up with a SSD to believe it. Just a huge difference. The X25 was ~ $600 last year, so at ~$200, it's worth having a closer look imo. Newegg link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820167016