HDD in laptop CD drive bay

Tomtom111 said:

Secondly, is the drive I've got in at the moment a good one?

If you see the review I linked above (and also here) the one you have is benchmarked in there as well and is top dog as far as performance goes.

It is a performance HDD (good to have your OS on it, a bit of a waste for bulk data), faster but requires more power and it's only 320 GB (when you can find 1 TB storage-oriented ones).

As for SSDs, I cannot speak for brands, but at around 150£ you can easily find a Crucial m4 or Samsung 830 with 256 GB, not just 128. Then you swap out the current one and place it as storage in the CD bay.

The optimal solution imho would be a SSD (128 GB will be more than enough as vaidas3 says) in the SATA II slot AND a 1 TB hdd in the CD bay.

This one any good?

It is the right kind of device (about quality it's always the toss of a coin), but i'm a bit wary when they say "shipped from USA" like that. EU customs could or could not have issues with it, and may require you to pay them something (at least it's like this for Italy).

hmmm, on second thought... the first you linked says "Compatible with all universal laptops models except DELL HP IBM APPLE MS." Yours is hp right?

The second you linked (the cheaper one) is unclear. The description sucks. See if you can talk to the seller to know more, as "Innoo Tech**" is a seller using amazon as selling platform.

This is on ebay, but says it should fit in HP.

The key is "attached" to the machine hardware. Your license is not. This means that if you change hardware, the key might work, or it might not, it depends the hardware change. I don't know the rules that govern this (monitor ok?, memory-ok?, disk drive-not ok?)

To activate windows in this situation, you just have to click on other activation means and there should be a regional phone number you can call. Tell them what you did (put in a SSD) and give them your existing key. They'll give you a new key if your old one isn't on the violation list.

It's easy.

All OEM-licenced OSs I reinstalled on a new HDD after a HDD failure didn't make any fuss (both XP and Win 7). The key should be theoretically linked to motherboard, but I had some that didn't made a fuss even when I swapped mobo for a different one.

Besides, if they make it linked to HDD you'd see angry mobs with forks and torches assaulting MS's HQ every few weeks. Hard drive failure is much much much more common than motherboard failure.

Hi Tom,

I tried to find inforamtion by searching on the Optical Drive (OP) but it wasn't conclusive. Could update your system specs to include model information? all it says now is HP.

If you look in your favorites, there might be a link directly to your machine's page - please post that in a post here (can't in specs).

Thanks. There should be infor on the drive sticker that can also identify the interface type. Take a scan or camera shot of the sticker and post that as well

Bill
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