T41p hard drive upgrade success story

[Temetka]

So I have this wonderful T41p laptop. Why did I upgrade the hard drive? I need more space so I can dual boot XP and Linux. The 60GB drive just wasn't cutting it.

So I went to Fry's Electronics as I had to return a bum HP external lightscribe burner. Then I went over to the computer area and looked at HD's. I was looking at Hitachi Travelstar drives as I know without a doubt they would work in my laptop. However the largest drive they had is the same drive I have now. Useless as an upgrade.

Enter Fujitsu and their 120GB laptop hard drive for only $119. Sweet as I had close to $80 coming to me for the burner I returned. This is the Fujitsu MHV2120 drive. It's ATA/100 compliant, features a 12ms seek time and an 8MB cache. The downside? It's a 5400RPM drive. A little slower (in terms of specs) than the drive I was replacing. However I am of the belief that the greater areal density of the drive platter will pay off in the form of some surprising speed. I can't say right now as XP is installing and I am on my desktop machine.

I was afraid I might come across one of those infamous error messages relating to the use of a non-IBM sanctioned drive in the machine. However I figured I'd take a shot. If it worked than I effectively doubled my storage space for $49 plus tax. So far it seems to be working great. I'll slip the old 60GB drive into my portable enclosure. I have a 60GB drive in there now, but it's 5400RPM and I might as well run the fastest drive in it I can.

I just thought I'd post this in case other T4x (non T43) users were looking at upgrading their storage. I can't speak for all 3rd party drives, but I can say that this Fujitsu drive is working great.