Upgrading Internal SATA HDD of HP Pavilion dm4

[GGR]

Hi

I have HP dm4 - 1150 ea bought I think in Dec 2004.  It has intel core i5 and 500 GB HDD.

It is working fine.  I hae ben wanting to upgrade the HDD but 2.5 inch SATA HDDs for this capacity were not available.

2.5 inch SATA Internal drives of 2TB for laptops are now available.  The OEM version seems to be available for around £ 80 in the UK.  Has anyone successfully upgraded the HDD of their laptop?  Does anyone know if I buy and install the new 2TB SATA HDD will it work.  If not why?

Would be grateful for response from anyone who has tried this on dm4 or similar HP laptops

Thanks

[daniel71317]

Here is a link to the manual for your laptop:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03106715.pdf

You'll see that HP says your laptop will support up to a 750gb sata hard drive or a 160gb solid state drive. You may find that your laptop will support larger hard drives, but may require a BIOS update to do so. You can check for any available updates for your laptop on this page:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/drivers.html

Many laptops will support up to 1tb without any issue, I am honesly unsure of 2tb... Hopefully this gives you a starting place however.

[GGR]

Thanks daniel.

Shall check the links that you ahve given.

My dm4 was bought in Jan 2011 and not in Dec 2004 as reported earlier (dm4 did not exisit then!).

The Sr No is CNU0520KR4 if this helps you / others to guide me.

I am thinking of the following procedure to upgrade the HDD:

1. Connect the new HDD to the sata port provided for DVD drive (unplug conenctions to dvd drive including power and sata connections and connect these to new HDD).

2. Clone existing HDD that has system on it to new HDD.

3. Then power off, connect new HDD in place of existing HDD and reconnect DVD drive.

4. System should then boot from the new HDD.

I followed this procedure to upgrade the HDD in my desktop from 500GB to 2TB, except that I used the spare sata port to connect and clone the new HDD.  It worked fine.

Should this procedure work for the new HDD for my latptop, assuming of course that 2TB HDD would be supported.

Thanks.

[daniel71317]

To be honest, I have not personally done a whole lot with cloning drives. I have a few friends that have and they said it should work ok. I have always used recovery disks to set up a new hard on laptops. It may take a little more time and will require backing up files and reinstalling programs, but your system will probably run faster and smoother this way. Laptop hard drives act a little differently on some computers than desktop hard drives do. Some computer manufacturers on some models will 'tie' the hard drive to the motherboard. In practice, this means you can't simply pop the hard drive out of one laptop and plug it into another and have it work correctly. Cloning should take care of this, but if you have issues with it, the recovery disks can help you get things set up on the new hard drive.

[Huffer]

Don't try to clone it through the DVD SATA connection, just get a usb to SATA adapter. The DVD port is a mini-SATA and you likely do not have a cable to connect to that anyway and would need to buy it and the USB to SATA is likely cheaper. 

http://www.amazon.com/Patuoxun-Converter-Adapter-Cable-Drive/dp/B008ASF5MC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=14...

The two TB drive will work fine. SATA drives have no BIOS imposed size limit so no need to update the BIOS and the Manual just lists what was available at the time the laptop was sold. Means nothing in terms of what it will take now. There is no tying of the hard drive to the motherboard so no need to worry about that.

I personally use Acronis True Image for cloning but there are lots of programs out there. Clonezilla is free but a little hard to use in cloning drives of different sizes. 

If this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as Solution" to help others find it. 

[GGR]

Hi Huffer

Thanks for your interest and opinion that the HDD is not tied to the motherboard and so, the bios need not be upgraded.

Also thanks for the tip of not using the port of optical drive.

I am thinking of buying a cheap enclosure anyway that can accommodate the 2.5 inch drive and has both USB and eSATA ports.  That way, I can connect the new HDD to my laptop via eSATA port and copy my existing 500GB disc on to the new disc and then swap them, but do not connect the old one through esata first.  Boot the system with the new one and then I can use the old HDD in the enclosure for addtional storage.

I found that the existing 500GB HDD is WD500BEKT-60KA9T0.  This is a 7200 rpm HDD and its reviews are good.

For the new HDD, I was looking at the Samsung 2TB M9T.  However, some people of reported that its reliability is not very good and that in many cases, the drive failed after a few months or weeks.

So, instead I am looking at 1TB HDDs from Hitachi (this is now a WD company).  7,200 rpm model looks good and fast.

Once I put this in the laptop and also have the old 500GB in the enclosure, I think the total capacity of 1.5TB should be good enough. 

One doubt I have is whether the drive in my laptop is SATAII (3GB/S) or SATAIII (6GB/s).  Is there a way to find out.  Most new HDDs seem to come with SATAIII.  If the interface with motherboard is SATAII (as this is a rather old laptop), would the new SATAIII HDDs work with it?

Also, if you have experience of a good HDD that is fast but also consumes less power, please let me know.

I shall certainly mark your reply as accepted solution once I select and install the new HDD.

Thanks again

GGR

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

If it is the original drive it is SATA-II as SATA-III was not then invented. Confirmed here:

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701275.pdf

You can replace it with a SATA-III drive without the slightest concern. They are seamlessly backward compatible. Your motherboard is at best a SATA-II and might even be SATA-I but I don't think so. 

I avoid the current largest capacity drives because the drive makers have to invent new technological tricks to cram more and more zeroes and ones into the same sized box and it takes a while to work out the kinks. Right now 1 TB is the sweet spot for laptop drives and 2 or 3 TB for desktop drives. Stay with a 1 TB 7200 rpm drive or even a 1 TB hybrid drive would only be a few extra bucks. 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340

Hope that helps. 

If this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as Solution" to help others find it. 

[GGR]

Hi Huffer

Thank you very much!

Following your advice, I decided to stick to 7200 rpm 1TB drive from Hitachi: 7K1000 with 32MB RAM for GBP 48.00 from amazon UK.  Have also ordered an enclosure that has eSATA & USB2.0 ports for a low cost of GBP 7.70!

I decided agains the hybrid drive as I read somehere that you have no control of what data it sores on the HDD and in NAND flash.  This might cause a problem to 'clone' the drive.

Hope this all works.  Shall post the results of my trial and if this is successful, shall certainly mark your solution as Accepted so that others can follow it.  Of course shall post if I face any problems and hope you would help.

Thanks once again for your interest and advice!!

[GGR]

I can now update everyone on what I have done successfully.  Thanks for Daniel and Huffer for their interest and advice.

This is what I did:

1. Bought Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000, 1TB from Amazon for GBP 48.00 free delivery.

2. Bought enclosure SATA 2.5 to USB & eSATA from Amazon (sold by EZI Trading) for GBP 7.79 free delivery.  This enclosure has both USB2.0 and eSATA ports and comes with communication cables for USB2.0 & eSATA and a separate cable to power up the enclosure from another USB port of laptop (I think even any 5V supply with a round plug will also do).

3. Assembled the new drive in the enclosure and copied my existing 500 GB WD disk in the laptop to new 1TB disk using Esus partition magic (free version).

4. Created new partitions in the remaining 500 Gb on the new disk.

5. Switched off the laptop.

6. Removed the old 500 GB HDD from latop, assembled the new one in the laptop and assembled the old 500 GB HDD in the enclosure.

7. Booted the laptop with the new HDD (without connecting the enclosure and old disk).  It booted with no problems.

8. Connected the enclosure with old 500GB to eSATA port.  Laptop detected it, installed software for it and this is also now seen and can be used.

9. Tried connecting the old disk in the enclosure to laptop's USB port with the USB cable provided.  This also works very well.

I am very pleased with the new Travelstar 1TB.  It is a little faster than the old WD 500GB.  I think it represents good value for money.

For the present, I have stuck to the advise from Huffer to use 1TB HDD that is by now well established.  Would also want to try sometime in the future a 2TB HDD when more suppliers come up with such a drive in 2.5 inch 9.5 mm size.  At present only Samsung Spinpoint M9T is such a drive. 

In my opinion, buying a 2.5 inch HDD and an enclosure that has both USB2.0 and eSATA ports is a better solution than going for the so many external enclosed drives with USB3.0 that are on offer.  This is particularly useful to upgrade HDD of old laptops that do not have USB3.0 and for those laptops that happen to have eSATA port.

Hope this would be useful to other users who wish to upgrade the HDD of their old laptop.

I am unable to comment muc on further query posted on this thread by Owen on connecting SSD for laptop.

I can only suggest that he can try the Hybrid drives offered by Seagate that has a normal HDD + flash memory built in the same drive that is available in 9.5 mm thickness and can be fitted to the laptop.  The Nand flash memory is 8GB.  I did not opt for this since I wish to have the option to clone my C drive in the HDD to an external disk as a safe back up in case of HDD in the laptop crashes.  I am told that you do not know what files would be stored on the nand flash.