I'm looking to upgrade my laptops hard drive. What do I need to know?

1) Make sure that it is a 2.5” Laptop drive (of course).
2) If you are looking for speed in accessing files, get a more expensive 7200 RPM drive, If you are trying to save money, get the average 5400 RPM drive.
3) Try to get one with at least 4mb cache, otherwise it will be slower.

As long as you go with a trusted brand, you should be fine. I prefer Western Digital over others, but Seagate and Samsung are good too.

yeah, I love my WD external, and a couple of my friends swear by seagate.

Seagate has had some problems with failing drives recently. They were all desktop, so I wouldn’t worry.

Personally i’ve had a lot of problems with seagate/maxtor, however that was all external drives. Internally i’ve had great success with toshiba. But keep in mind that the hard drive technology is old, and that all hard drives will eventually fail at some time. Allways have your stuff stored at least two places, and consider buying a Solid state drive.

There’s a lot of conflicting info out there. (I did a bunch of online research a few months ago to buy mine.) I vaguely remember discussion about 7200 rpm drives being noisier and maybe running hotter/sucking more juice than 5400 drives. Cache size is the linchpin, though. For average use, it probably doesn’t matter as much, but for intense use, you probably want to go 4 or 8 mb (or whatever is standard right now).

If you’re not a FireWire user, one slick idea is to purchase a large, portable, external USB drive, such as a Western Digital Passport, and swap the two drives. So your current internal drive becomes a external/utility drive and the newly purchased drive becomes your beefier internal hard drive. Here’s an example. Note that the procedure is for a MacBook, but the essential process will work for Windows as well. If you don’t want to do that, you can just buy a separate enclosure for your old drive and pick from USB, FireWire, or a combination.

Here’s the physical procedure for the T61.

The other factors you’ll need to double check are the height of the drive. MacBooks, for example, won’t accommodate anything taller than 9.5 mm. I’m not sure about the ThinkPad.

Also, you’ll need to make sure the interface is compatible. Probably what you’ll want is a SATA interface that supports a 3.0 Gb/s data transfer. Other options are SATA 1.5, ATA (older tech), and eSATA (brand new tech).

You can probably find out these things by looking at your “devices” profiler in Windows.

I just bought one of these to upgrade my HP laptop…I am very happy with it so far. The key thing is the interface like kevbo says…If in doubt, unscrew the panel under the laptop where the drive is (you are going to have to do this anyway) and remove the drive (very carefully) to check whether it is sata or ata..The whole process is really easy, then the fun starts with installing your os, or reimaging from your backup image.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136159

Well, because I have IBM T series, I’m thinking about something like this, but I can’t tell if it’s an actual hard drive or just the adapter and I’d need to buy a drive additionally.

“This adapter enables Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive expansion allowing you to add a second hard drive in the ThinkPad native SATA media bay for back-up, additional storage, or data migration.”

It’s an adapter. Keep in mind that if you want to replace your current HD, you won’t need this.

I know, but I have the slot for it. I might just make it an axillary drive.