Replacing SK hynix BC501 HFM512GDJTNG-8310A with a faster and larger capacity.

[deckhanddave]

Hi all.

Every two or three windows updates and my bios starts telling me my hard drive is going to go KABLOOEY! very soon in the near futre, maybe this week or next year. Infact it has been doing this for over a year now and I've finally got fed up of it. I don't know if it's a real problem or a false one. BIOS says it's a gonna go, Drive tests say it's a ok! Anyway, I think I'm going to change it out for something that's faster and maybe has more memory than the 500GB one that is in. I'm totally behind on specs for these drives and would like to know what if any, improved drives would fit into my laptop. Also, would increasing the capacity to 1or possibly even 2 TB would be a problem? I know there can be problems with recognising larger capacity drives but I think it's not the problem it used to be. My example being my mobile phone. It says it can take a 512GB card but I popped a 1TB in and it didn't even sneeze at it. So, please, any advice would be much appreciated on what alternative drives I might be able to use and whether increasing the capacity from 512 to 1TB would be a problem.

Many thanks to all who read this and offer advice.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

You should be able to replace the 512 GB NVMe SSD with one having a greater storage capacity up to 4 TB.

That's what the Crucial memory/SSD report indicates:

HP Pavilion 15-cw1598sa | Memory RAM & SSD Upgrades | Crucial UK

Your notebook's NVMe SSD slot is PCIe Gen 3.0.

While a Gen 4.0 SSD will work fine, it will not run at its maximum advertised read/write speeds from the Gen 3.0 SSD sot.

This table shows the maximum transfer speeds each PCIe slot generation can provide.

PCIe Speeds and Limitations | Crucial.com

Below is the link to the service manual:

Maintenance and Service Guide HP Pavilion 15 Laptop PC

HP only offered NVMe SSDs up to 512 GB in storage capacity, but that is just what they offered, not the maximum capacity supported.

[deckhanddave]

Hi Paul.

Thanks for that advice. There was an unexpected bonus to it. I had some problems with the Crucial web site and found out that their Customer service is absolutely 1st class. That is no exageration and based on it, I will be purchasing Crucial. A quick example, I got cut off from my chat and the agent I was chatting with. I went back on their chat in a different window and mentioned about getting cut off and apologised if the agent thought I was being rude and cut him off. Low and behold, the next day I received an email from the agent I was chatting with saying he realised that it was a continuation of the problems I had been having. I was gobsmacked that someone took the time to look into who I had been chatting with and had told them what I had put in a second chat window. The guy also sent me links to pages advising how to change HD and my RAM. Also, any problems and to contact him through his email and he will endeavour to help. So again, thanks for your advice.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Yes, I too have always found that Crucial's products and customer service are excellent.

I have an old Crucial P5 NVMe SSD and several PCs with Crucial memory.

I once had one 16 GB memory chip go bad, and they replaced it for free within days.

All I had to do was to pay the return postage to ship the defective memory chip back to them.

Cheers,

Paul