What is maximum size of hard drive I can replace to my default one? & other hdd performance issue

[Madz33]

My default hard drive is almost out of space and I'm planning to upgrade it. What is the maximum size that this model could handle? Is 2TB- 3TB fine?

Another question.

I replaced my optical disk to an HDD caddy with a 250gb SSD inside it. I installed my new OS there and made it the default boot drive. The default HDD that comes with the laptop is my backup drive. Is this set up okay?

or

Do I have to put my SSD on the default HDD area and place my 2tb/3tb hdd on the caddy for maximum performace?

[banhien · Accepted solution]

Hi,

1. In theory you can get 2TB or TB but 1TB has better peformance.

2. You can't boot from the caddy. My suggestion: use SSD for normal bay and use 2TB in the caddy. You will have both what you want.

3. As (2) above.

Regards.

[Captain_WD]

Hi there Madz33 🙂 

A couple of notes from me:

I would suggest swapping the SSD and the storage HDD as the SATA port where the optical drive goes is usually either a SATAI or a SATAII and either would seriously bottleneck the performance of your SSD while the SATAIII main port should enable it to work at its full potential. The limitation of SATAI and SATAII ports shouldn't be relevant for a storage HDD so you should be OK using one there. 

I wouldn't consider smaller HDDs faster in terms of performance as larger drives can perform better compared to drives with smaller capacity due to better data density. I would check some drives' spec sheets and compare he performance there. I could suggest checking out WD Blue as a potential storage drive for your laptop. You can check its spec sheet and see that the 3TB version has considerably more amount of cache compared to the other versions so it should give you quite good performance. 

Let me know if you have any questions! 

Captain_WD. 

[Madz33]

Thank you for your clear explanation.

[Captain_WD]

You are most welcome! I'd be glad to provide more information if you need any. 

Post back when you make a decision and make some progress on the storage upgrade. 

Captain_WD.