Largest hard drive for T43?

[kidpaprika]

I was wondering if anyone could tell me what the largest hard drive is that I could buy for my T43 (2668) that would work "out of the box"?

I've read about various drives that will/won't work, many of which require playing around with firmware, etc. I'm a bit scared of buying one and then finding that I am unable to get it to work, so I'd like to get one that will work with minimal fuss.

Any advice?

[aaa]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 0281142b09

Either 160 or 200 it seems.

Might want to find out more about the 2010 issue, was it cleared up by a BIOS update?

[ulrich.von.lich]

Unfortunately the 2010 problem is only solved on selected hard drives. (You can get rid of the 2010 error warning on some Hitachi Travelstar HDDs, and some Fujitsu HDDs will work out of the box)

If you can live with it, I believe there's a Western Digital 250GB 5400RPM hard drive which can be used in a T43.

[is]

I've read about various drives that will/won't work, many of which require playing around with firmware, etc. I'm a bit scared of buying one and then finding that I am unable to get it to work, so I'd like to get one that will work with minimal fuss.

I have two T43s (2668-W4M and 2668-6CU) whose hard disk drives have been upgraded to Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (HTS721010G9AT00) ones. These are very fast and quiet 7,200 RPM 100 GB hard disk drives that are working fine. You must make sure to get the IBM (not OEM) flavor of the drives if you do not want to play around with the firmware (i.e., crossflashing the drives with IBM firmware) to avoid the 2010 error.

Make sure to use a supported drive and firmware to avoid problems with the laptop: these machines have a SATA-to-PATA bridge, so the HDD firmware requires some improvements to work reliably. Not a bug, just a requirement.