Itb Hard Drive for Laptop Thoughts

dx052

I was thinking of getting one of those 1TB hard drives for my laptop, great for storing all my music. I think its a Samsung one! Initally I was going to get a 500g but there isn't a great difference in price. Do I need to be aware of anything? Seems that HDs are getting bigger & bigger!

While I am at it I am assuming that I am going to have to install an O/S again, as I don't have a disc & I am currently running XP should get a Win 7 or should I just stick with getting XP. Thanks

leemoss

Theres no technical issues using a 1TB drive over a 500gb drive, just remember ideally you should back this drive up regularly so you'll need some way of doing this.

dx052

So maybe get an external HD and back up every so often and have my music/files stored in two places.

System

do you need 1tb for laptop? the 9.5mm 1tb's seem to be relatively new technology (the older ones are 12.7? which is bigger than a lot of laptops can take) i think it would be worth reading lots of reviews on something like that to see what issues there are with specific models

dx052

I could get away with 500g but I thought for the sake of £20 I could get double. I have actually read a few reviews elsewhere & I am not 100% comfortable about a 1TB internal yet.

closed

you can create a disk image or clone to avoid the need to reinstall windows, but you need somewhere to put it, ie another external drive or caddy for existing drive

there are 2 types, pata, and sata, if yours is an older machine, it's probably pata - so you need to make sure whatever you buy is correct for your machine.

molerat

If you are running genuine licenced XP and have the serial then there is no reason to buy another operating system, just get hold of a disk and install it.

bruticus

If you're going to use 1tb, then get the drive, if not, it's excessive.

Also, as most people have mentioned, you will need an identical size hard drive if not bigger for backup.

I have a 128gb SSD drive, but I store all my data on a 2gb NAS on my home network, maybe you could do something similar (not necessarily with an SSD)

arriva

I regularly use Acronis True Image 2011 boot CD to clone my 500GB laptop hard disc onto another 500GB hard disk of the same brand. I connect the 2nd HD via the ultrabay slot (IBM Thinkpad T61, Lenovo actually...) but an external USB cable would do the job. The USB-to-SATA cable costs only a few pounds, they also do USB-to-IDE plus USB-to-SATA all in one.
I do this every couple of weeks and once cloned you can swap hard disks and you won't notice the difference.

A few points to note: I used to use Acronis True Image 2009 but it wouldn't write the GRUB correctly (I have one Windows partition and 2 Linux OS installed on the same hard disk) so every time I had to fix the Grub manually to access the second hard disk and check that all is OK. It only takes 5 minutes to fix it but still... it needs tampering with.
They fixed this problem in Acronis 2011 and now it is fine, just clone and forget about it (it could be that they fixed this issue in the 2010 version, I don't know as I jumped from Acronis 2009 to 2011).

The cloning process (500GB sata 7200RPM) takes about 1 hour 30 minutes using the Ultrabay in the Thinkpad. I suppose it will take a little longer via USB connection.

Windows doesn't seem to realise it is sitting on a different drive so it doesn't bother with licence etc once the hard disks are swapped. Only Photoshop seems to notice the hardware change, you just need to re-enter the licence number and it is all fixed. In any case I always use the original hard disk and keep the clone as a "true" backup.

The version of Acronis True Image to use is the boot CD which you can create once you have installed the main software (you can also create a bootable USB).
Because I hate installing unecessary software on my computer and Acronis is not what I would call a "discreet" program, I installed Acronis True Image Home on a virual machine, created a bootable CD (save the ISO to the host operating system) then reverted to snapshot.
Once you have the ISO you can either burn a CD or copy it on a USB stick then add a grub startup menu with other recovery software.