Which hard drive is the best choices for my HDX16-1140US?

I currently have a Seagate Momentus 5400rpm 500 GB hard drive which came with my laptop. However, I checked the SMART status two days ago and it said that it was failing so I want to buy a new hard drive to replace it. I posted on the HP Support Forums about it in this thread:

Can I replace the hard drive in my HP HDX16-1140US with this... - HP Support Forum

According to the service manual, I can only have two drives (though I have never seen this second drive bay in my model) and the maximum size and speed for them is 2 x 500GB each running at 5400 rpm. I would like to get the Western Digital Scorpio Black 500 GB drive and buy an external drive to supplement it but according to the HP Service manual the maximum drive speed allowed for a 500 GB drive is 5400 rpm which means I would have to go with the WD Blue instead. Any suggestions?

 

I highly doubt that you cannot exceed the 500gb capacity. I see no reason why a higher capacity disk would not work.

Get that largest capacity laptop 2.5" drive you can find with 7200rpm. I would recommend you get it from Amazon so you can return it in case I'm wrong. But this is very unlikely.

Also external drives cost more than internal drives.. And you can always convert the 1tb internal to an external with a caddy case if you don't want to ship it back

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Alright. In that case I'm now trying to choose between a WD Black 750 GB drive or the Seagate Momentum XT 500 GB. Which one is the better choice? I know the hybrid HD is faster and has the best of both SSD and HD but I want to make sure that my computer can use it.

 

This one:

Amazon.com: Hitachi Travelstar 2.5-Inch 500GB 7200RPM SATA III 32MB Cache SATA 6Gb/s Internal Hard Drive 500 sata_6_0_gb 32 MB Cache 2.5 Internal Bare or OEM Drives HTS725050A7E630: Computers & Accessories


What I learned from here I pass on to you. As you can see I have the previous version and they still spin like tops after nearly 4 years. If they make a 750GB model, so much the better.

 

Does the SATA 3 features work with your motherboard? From what I've seen from your profile you have a HDX 18 so I'm thinking your motherboard might be the same as mine.

 

Those are the new ones, I have the SATA II. Still, even that is moot since HD don't come near in maxing it out.

 

Sata3 will work with sata2 connectors, if your thinking of getting a new laptop with Sata3 anytime this year then buying a sata3 drive might be worth your while

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

As noted there's no reason you can't go with a higher-capacity AND faster-spinning drive.

Your HDX has two drive bays ... check to see if there is a caddy in the second bay. HP historically has not included one if the notebook was not ordered with a second hard drive (meaning you cannot install a second hard drive there on your own).
But if the caddy is there, then what you can do is install a small SSD (60-100GB) in one of the drive bays and put a hard drive in the second one; install the OS and programs onto the SSD and map your documents, videos, pictures, music, and so on over to the hard drive. I do that with my notebook and it works beautifully.

But if you don't have that second hard drive bay caddy then I agree with Krane that the Hitachi TravelStar drives are good quality. The only other brand I'd consider is Western Digital. I have been using their drives almost exclusively since 2004 and have had good success. The Scorpio Black series are the fastest available (on par with the TravelStar 7K series) - they spin at 7200RPM and come with a nice 5-year warranty.
www.amazon.com
Newegg.com - Computer Parts, Laptops, Electronics, HDTVs, Digital Cameras and More!
- two good places to look for drives. I tend to use Newegg since their warehouse is over the river from me and I get everything the next day.

 

Thanks for the advice everybody. I chose to go with the Travelstar yesterday and got it through Amazon. If there's a second bay with my computer I'll add an SSD in the future.

 

You're welcome and best of luck with the drive. Hitachi and Western Digital are the "gold standard" of hard drives. I've had positive experiences with other brands (Samsung comes to mind) but not consistently positive as I have with those two, over the years.

 

A note just remember that you will get the most out of the SSD if you use it as your boot drive which means you will have to a fresh OS install or clone the HD. If you have to much on it you will only be able to do a clean install.

 

I installed my new drive on Sunday. It went okay though I had to remove the bezel so I could get the metal parts holding the drive to line up with the screws. That was very annoying. Now here's my current problem. I cloned my old drive (Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate Edition) using Redo Backup. The hard drive had two partions: the main one and the recovery partition that every OEM seems to have. After spending hours restoring my partition, it seems to be stuck on trying to get the Master Boot Record back in place (it's taken it about an hour and a half which I figure is pretty long for something so small). When I checked the Disk Utility, it said that my partitions were misaligned. I did a little Google searching and turns out that the Travelstar uses the new Advanced Formating which has 4K for each sector. My drives uses 512 emulation but apparently that's not good enough. Now I'm a little stuck because I'm not sure how to re-partition my drive. Any suggestions? I know there's a realignment tool but it's Windows only and I'm not sure if I can boot Windows at this point.

 

Actually, I'm fine now. All I needed to do was run the alignment tool.