Thinkpads Forum

IBM's site says the largest drive offered with this laptop was 18gb. Will it take a larger drive? For example, I have a 20gb drive from my old x20 that I will be parting out due to a cracked screen. Will this fit? Any bios limitations? I have seen some 600x's on eBay selling with 20gb and 40gb drives but can't find any info to support the larger capacities. Thanks for any help you can provide!

Any 600 series machine, provided it has the latest BIOS, is able to use any of the current stock of laptop HDs up to and including the latest 80GB and 100GB ones.

If you want to see something in writing that a specific HD will work in your system, the onus is on the HD manufacturer to prove it, not IBM.

For instance: http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... F3007CB298 is a summary of all the systems that the Hitachi 7K60 was tested on. You'll note the 600X is conspicuous by its absence, but only because the HD was tested on the 600 and 600E, so it follows that it will also work on the 600X.

Regards,

James

Thank you James! As usual, this place is a great resource!

For nostalgic reason, I am offering the new update on this as of May, 2011:

So far the largest PATA/IDE 2.5" hard drive on the market is 320GB and as long as you have NTFS or EXT2/3 formatted the drive, 600x has no problem using it to its fullest potential. I guess since PATA/IDE is phasing out of market, 320GB is probably the largest HD we will see.

How time flies!

I tried formating my whole 320 gig drive as one partition, and it wouldn't boot in a 240. That might just be the 240, or it might be FAT32. Or you might need to use a "137"(128) gig or smaller boot partition.

There are IDE to sata hard drive adapters and sata hard drives up to 1TB. I'm pretty sure (based on measurements) the 1TB drives with an adapter on the end will fit in a 600 series, but be careful about the adapters! some advertise that they'll work with drives up to 500 gig, others up to 1500 gig.

Doesn't the IDE/SATA adapter add some space? Do you have a link?

If it works, then it is great news.

I don't think i've seen a laptop with enough room for one... here is a link to the 1st i saw on google: http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahadrtoide.html.

Looks like it would add a significant amount of length to a hard disk. That page even states: "Suitable for POS Systems (will not fit into most laptops)"

I ate crab and now I can report the result. I bought from a seller on Ebay that has the adapter sold for hundreds of times and his feedback is close to 100%. I even emailed him if adding the adapter will make the hard drive too long to fit in a laptop. He replied that it won't, so I bought one. The adapter came in a few days ago. It will add 3/4 inch to the length and the position of the IDE pins are awkward enough to fit any laptop or secondary HDD adapter. I searched on the web on this topic and found out the "success" story for using this kind of adapter is on a Fujitsu notebook that uses a ribbon to connect the harddrive to the motherboard and the hard drive chamber has some room that the DIYer removed some frame to fit the hard drive plus the adapter in.

I guess the pursuit of such solution is end of the road unless the adapter can be made flexible instead of rigid.