Laptop HDD question

sb44

Sorry but not technical at all so this may be a stupid question, but..........

I see lots of laptops for sale on ebay without hdd's, can you transfer a hdd from any laptop and use it in another or are they make, model specific?

We have 3 old laptops that we don't use and I was wondering if I could just take out the hdd to use in another one.

macman

Mechanically speaking, almost all modern laptops use 2.5" SATA drives and so should be transferable, unless your old ones are not SATA.

googler

The only thing likely to trip you up is driver compatibility. One machine having drivers specific to that model, and these being incompatible with the other.

Try it and see.

sb44

Thanks very much.

Avoriaz

sb44 wrote: »

..We have 3 old laptops that we don't use and I was wondering if I could just take out the hdd to use in another one.

In theory yes but it isn't necessarily straightforward.

Firstly are your disks the older 2.5inch IDE or the newer 2.5inch SATA type? They are not interchangeable so the disk must match the laptop.

If the disc type does match the laptop you would be advised to delete everything on it by doing a format and starting your OS and driver etc installation from scratch. That avoids the likely driver mismatch mentioned above.

What capacity (GBs) are your discs and what Operating System do you want to use them with?

If your disc is lowish capacity you may struggle to fit a current OS on it.

sb44

Avoriaz wrote: »

In theory yes but it isn't necessarily straightforward.

Firstly are your disks the older 2.5inch IDE or the newer 2.5inch SATA type? They are not interchangeable so the disk must match the laptop.

If the disc type does match the laptop you would be advised to delete everything on it by doing a format and starting your OS and driver etc installation from scratch. That avoids the likely driver mismatch mentioned above.

What capacity (GBs) are your discs and what Operating System do you want to use them with?

If your disc is lowish capacity you may struggle to fit a current OS on it.

I was just wondering if the hard drive in the old dell latitude was bigger than the one in the thinkpad T20 that I dug out the other day, it makes a nice change browsing on a large screen compared to the piddly Acer Aspire One screen that I normally use.

Anyway, I had a look and it said 6GB on that! The one in the T20 is a massive 20GB!!!!!!