DV9000 Maximum Hard Disk Size Supported?

[AlexEthridge]

I'm searching for a used HP Pavilion DV9000.  I need to know the maximum hard disk size the DV9000 series laptops support.  To be clear, could I put a 750G or 1TB disk in each bay?

HP's web site isn't helpful. It gives only the "official" numbers at time of release which state it supports up to 240G, 120 in each bay. Those kinds of numbers are almost never an accurate statement of the limitation as I have seen similar "official" numbers for other HP laptops (supposedly limited to 120G or 250G or whatever) that have no problem supporting 640G in the real world.

The size of hard disk a computer supports is usually a function of the main board's chipset and I don't know how to determine the exact chipset or find the chipset's hard disk support capability. Again, HP's web site isn't helpful here either. They may list it has an nVidia chipset; but, they don't mention which nVidia chipset.

To be clear, I don't own a DV9000 yet and I need to know how to find this information maybe with the exact model number. The model series may be DV9000; but, there are dozens of more exacting model numbers on the bottoms of the DV9000 series computers (example: DV9025ea).  I don't want to purchase a DV9000 and then find that its limitation really is 120G per bay.

[Mumbodog]

Hard drive size is a limitation of the Bios, not the chipset, this was overcome with the implementation of Large Block Addressing 48bit in modern bios's in 2003

Hp does not state which bios's on older laptops support this or not.

Looking at the production dates of the 9000 series, I would be willing to bet it supports any size hard drive (48bit LBA), since 48bit LBA was introduced in 2003

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

That being said, there could be brand compatibility issues, so be sure to buy the hard drives from a source that has a friendly return policy.

Maybe some one can post that has actually installed a large hard drive in a 9000 series.

.

.

[RoadiJeff]

I just installed a 750GB Seagate Momentus drive in the secondary drive bay yesterday in my wife's dv9700.  There's a thread about it on here if you want the details but everything is working fine.  I replaced a 120GB drive.

Here's the thread:  Replacing a Secondary Hard Drive on an HP Pavilion dv9700

[e5z8652]

Note that a dv9700 is NOT a dv9000.  dv9000 series computers have models such as dv9013cl (prebuilt for Costco), etc.

The dv9700 series is much newer and completely different motherboard.

To the OP:

It would appear that the dv9000 "sort of" supports LBA48.  From my experience you cannot use a disk larger than 137GB in the 2nd bay at all.  The machine won't boot.  You can boot with a disk larger than 137GB in the 1st bay, but performance is iffy and there are occasional freezes that last up to 30 seconds as the SATA bus resets.

With a dv9000 laptop you're best off using a SATA I (1.5Gb/sec) disk of 137GB or less.

[e5z8652]

I should note that you can increase performance with a newer Linux kernel (2.6.35 & 36) by using the following boot argument:

sata_nv.swncq=1

I think this is actually on by default, but setting it explicitly seems to dramatically reduce the number of SATA bus resets.

[Csambuco]

I have recently replaced the original drives in a HP Pavillion dv9500.  I installed two Western Digital 10JPLX 1TB drives and upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows 8.1 Pro.   The computer is equipped with max memory and is running programs previously installed on the Vista OS.  The system is now operational for two weeks with no known problems or issues.  I noticed when reviewing system information that the 32 bit OS is running with a 64 bit Intel Proccessor.   Is it possible that the 32 bit OS can be replaced with a 64 bit OS?