hard drive - are all laptop harddisks the same?

08
2014-07
  • user13267

    I need to replace the hard disk on a laptop
    Is it necessary to get exactly the same hard disk that the laptop had before, or can I buy just any laptop hard disk and it will work?
    The laptop is compaq 620

    • Answers
  • davidgo

    You should be able to use pretty much any 2.5 inch drive- if your llaptop has a 2.5 inch drive installed, and as long as they have the same interface. Most do.


    • Related Question

    hard drive - how to tell if a laptop can have two harddisks
  • Andrei Rinea

    I would buy a large laptop (17 inch display) and would hope for it to be able to accommodate two velociraptor hard disk drives that I would set up in a RAID 0 array.

    How can I tell which laptops accomodate two hard disks and have a RAID controller?


    • Related Answers
  • 8088

    I know for a fact that laptops can have two hard drives. I recently upgraded a Gateway my friend has from Vista to Windows 7 and his laptop can have two drives. The way you could spot it on his is that it had two areas marked with a storage logo, looked like this:

    Storage Icon

    So if you are going to be looking at the laptops physically that might be one way of making sure. If this is all done online, I know Dell allows you to select another hard drive during the customization part if this can be done. You can also type the model number of the laptop you are looking at in Google and the spec sheet will provide you with expansion information.

  • wazoox

    Look at the datasheet. The only other way around is to pry the thing open at the store with a screwdriver but I'm afraid it wouldn't end so well.

  • Loren Pechtel

    They exist. The only ones I've seen are basically desktop replacement machines--big, heavy, not meant to be used in a portable fashion. They're meant to be hauled from point A to point B, plugged in and used. Most of these are gaming machines.

    The only way you'll know about a particular machine is to look it up.

  • Person with a laptop

    Any laptop that has an optical drive can have two HDD's, but it requires replacing the optical drive with a cradle that fits the second HDD. There are kits available for example for the non-retina macbook pro's that do this, and I imagine there's similar kits for other brands of laptop.

    If the laptop natively supports two HDD's the above "trick" can be used to add a third HDD to it.