Thinkpads Forum

I am intending to buy a new harddisk for my 390x. From the IBM website, I found that the maximum size of the harddisk that comes with the 390x is 6.4 and 12Gb. However, the minimum size for a new notebook harddisk nowadays is usually 20 to 40Gb. Has anyone tried a larger harddisk size on the 390x and found that it works properly?

If you look at www.compuvest.com you will see they have quite a selection of notebook hard drives of all sizes, even down to 2.1GB. I bought my 6.49GB unit there a couple of months ago, since I didn't want to deal with BIOS limitations. Look under notebook hard drives. I've ordered 3 different times from these guys, and all 3 deals were perfectly fine.

Their drives are new (not used), but I think virtually all of the smaller capacity ones are old stock. They have genuine IBM and Hitachi (among others), and they give the IBM model numbers for many, so you can check the exact specs in the IBM/Hitachi hard drive site.

As far as how big is the max for your 390X, sorry, I don't know.

The 390X with a PII uses the 440BX chipset and PIIX4E IO chip, so it should handle drives up to 138GB or so. It's contemporary with the 600E which can handle big drives too.

If your 390X has a PIII then it's certain to handle the big drives.

Thanks for your helpful information. I have just upgraded the harddisk to 10Gb and it works. My aunt has a 10Gb image tank lying around and I dissembled it to get the 10Gb IBM hardisk to use for my thinkpad.

Out of curiousity, I used the utility hwinfo32 to check on the system. Hwinfo32 detects that the 390x mainboard uses the PIIXe southbridge which does not support 48-bit addressing. This means that it can only support harddisk up to 137Gb. However, the supported harddisk size may be smaller depending on the motherboard bios. Up to now, I only know a 10Gb harddisk will work based on my experience.