R50e hard drive upgrade -- advice greatly appreciated.

[gw4frx]

Firstly, apologies for asking what may be a very simple question; I'm new to laptops and despite a good deal of Googling I can't come up with an answer. I've also have had no success in persuading IBM (or indeed Lenovo) to respond to several e-mails.

I bought a Thinkpad R50e (Model 1834Q2G) just before Christmas and it’s working very well. However, the 40GB hard drive turns out to be a bit small for what I need. It seems very unclear from the Lenovo site which other drives are supported for this machine, and in any event their prices seem very high in comparison with those of other brands.

From what I’ve read, it seems that IBM drives are built by Hitachi. So I thought it would be nice to be able to fit something like a 7K100 and gain the advantages of 7200rpm and 100GB. However, I can't for the life of me work out whether this is feasible and the Hotachi compatibility guide on their web site doesn’t mention the R50e.

Any advice from the experts on this forum would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

John

[fredstev]

There are lots of current threads about this subject, although I don't know how different the R50 is. Use the "search" feature at the top of the page and search on "hdd upgrade", click the "search for all terms" radio button, and under "Category" select "thinkpad hardware".

Just did this a couple of days ago to a R40, most people are having the best luck buying the ultrabay HDD adapter from IBM and using the new drive in the adapter and using the software that comes with the adapter to clone from the original hdd. I ended up using a trial version of Acronis Trueimage which worked VERY well.

You've got some reading to do.

[gw4frx]

>There are lots of current threads about this subject, although I don't know how different the R50 is.<

There are indeed, although none specifically about fitting this particular drive to an R50e and in particular whether its BIOS supports 100GB HDDs. That's why I asked the question.

>You've got some reading to do.<

I've already done rather a lot

John

[fredstev]

>There are lots of current threads about this subject, although I don't know how different the R50 is.<

There are indeed, although none specifically about fitting this particular drive to an R50e and in particular whether its BIOS supports 100GB HDDs. That's why I asked the question.

>You've got some reading to do.<

I've already done rather a lot

John

Yeah, I don't know about bios support. I'm sure that you'd be ok with a 80gb drive, though. here's one:

http://cgi.ebay.com/80GB-IBM-Thinkpad-A ... dZViewItem

Probably a Samsung or WD drive, you'd have to ask him. Some people have issues with the noise from the 100gb Hitachi drives.

[FRiC]

I don't know about 100 GB drives, but I've played hard drive musical chairs with 40/60/80 GB drives of various speeds and brands in my R50e's and R51's and never ran into any problems.

The problem (now resolved with the latest BIOS upgrade) where you have to press a key to boot when a non-IBM drive is used only happens with the newer ThinkPads like the R52 and T43.