Second hard drive questions

crapmanjoe

Hi,

Ok my story is as follows

I've being using my work laptop as my home machine for the last while but now they have gone and put some fancy software on it so cant connect any usb device to it anymore

I was thinking about buying a new laptop for home use but then some one pointed out that I could just get a second hard drive and swap between them (work for work, home for home).

Anyway was wondering could somebody please give me some pointers as to go about this.

The laptop in question is a Dell Latitude D620 and im looking to get a 80-160 gig hard drive for it.

Is it possible to buy hard drives that will come pre installed with windows XP?

Thanks

BeciMester

Swapping the HDDs would definitely work, but I personally don't think it's worth the hassle of unscrewing-replacing-rescrewing the HDD every night when you get home, and then again when you go to work, if that's what you mean. It'd probably be better to go and just pick up a laptop, even second hand, that suits your needs.

If you still want to go ahead with the swapping idea: one can't buy a hard drive with any operating system preinstalled, because the OS has to be installed for the hardware in the specific machine it will operate. You'd have to get a HDD your laptop supports, put it in and install XP yourself.

crapmanjoe

BeciMester wrote: »

Swapping the HDDs would definitely work, but I personally don't think it's worth the hassle of unscrewing-replacing-rescrewing the HDD every night when you get home, and then again when you go to work, if that's what you mean. It'd probably be better to go and just pick up a laptop, even second hand, that suits your needs.

If you still want to go ahead with the swapping idea: one can't buy a hard drive with any operating system preinstalled, because the OS has to be installed for the hardware in the specific machine it will operate. You'd have to get a HDD your laptop supports, put it in and install XP yourself.

Thanks for the reply,its actually not 2 much bother swapping the hard drives in and out (ive seen a mate do it) so thats the option i want to go for. See this as a little project for myself as well

Anyway did a quick google on the laptop and found this about the hard drive

"The hard drive technology used is SATA and you can configure up to a 160GB storage size hard drive. Hard drives with up to 7200RPM configurations are also available for those that want the increased performance you'll get from a faster spinning hard drive."

Does this mean i can use any internal hard drive as long as it meets the above criteria. For instance would the following hard drive be suitable?

http://www.memoryc.com/storage/internalharddrive/160gbhitachitravelstar5k250sata.html

Gadgetman496

Yes it would.

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PogMoThoin

Swapping back and forward would eventually damage the connections. Internal hard drives aren't designed for swapping continuously.

Gadgetman496

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Swapping back and forward would eventually damage the connections. Internal hard drives aren't designed for swapping continuously.

I would have to agree with that for sure.

You would want to be ever so careful & as they say, familiarity breeds contempt, the more often you do it the less care you are likely to take.

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