Hard drive upgrade limitations?

Hi.

Until recently, I've been trying to sell my old Lenny 3000 N100, but due to the lack of interested buyers (or the lack of my salesmanship skills) I'm thinking of giving it to my dad.

He does, however, want to swap the original 120gb harddrive for at least a 320gb one, and then wants to install XP instead of the default Vista Basic. He also asked if it was possible to transfer the recovery partition into the new drive.

But before we had the opportunity to up the hdd, we got hit by bad news when we called Lenovo support and when they told my dad that 120gb is the maximum tested size for the laptop...

My question: Is it true that there is a limitation to what size a laptop can support as a harddrive, or is the size all there is to it to consider? I've been thinking until now that I could fit even a 500gb 2.5" SATA drive into the thing without much more difficulties than installing drivers for it, etc. Any help would be great, thanks!

 

I can't imagine their would be. According to the service parts, Lenovo sold the N100 with 250GB hard drives.

 

So it's possible to bump it up to 320gb, then? Well at least, 250's quite decent already, but it states it was for the -0769..mine's the -0689 model, would that still go?

 

I doubt there is a problem bumping it up to 320GB. The only thing that might be worth watching is the speed of the drive. Some of the 7200RPM ones can run a little hotter than the 5400RPM variety and depending upon how the machine is setup inside the extra heat might not be appreciated by other components.

 

The n100 is a pretty thick machine, which will help with the heat. I've had 7200RPM hard drives since 7k40 and I've never had any heat issues with them.

I don't see anything to keep it from working. They make them all the same. They have different machine types for different specs like the CPU, memory, LCD, hard drive, etc. My R60, which probably has the same chipset, runs the 500GB 7200.4 just fine. If you're running XP, you'll need at least SP2 to see above 137GB on the hard drive. Perhaps that's what they were referring to.

 

As I said some drives have the issue. I myself have never had any problems either, but I know people that have.

 

I appreciate the prompt reply--although I have one last question.

Is there a significant performance improvement between let's say a 320gb hdd that runs at 5400rpm and one that runs at 7200? I'm decided to upgrade the hdd for my dad, though I'm not sure which ones to get.

 

That would depend on the particular drives in question. I know that some 320GB 5400RPM drives are only marginally slower than their 7200RPM counterparts, and use less power, which contributes to better battery life.