Best HDD's for laptops?

[David Wolfskill]

>Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:24:15 -0800
>From: Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org>

>	(I *promised* myself not to sink another penny into my 600E
>	but in case I break my word: will just about any laptop 
>	drive replace my 12GB IBM drive, or do I have to stick to
>	an IBM-"approved" drive?)

Back before IBM shut down Whistle, I had been using a Fujitsu
LifeBook for a while at work (since one of my colleagues no longer
needed it), and it proved to be useful, though it was pretty old
and had some hardware problems.  My (then) boss directed me to go
downstairs (Engineering was upstairs) to the IT folks & pick up a
ThinkPad 600E (which was the standard issue).

I did, and immediately swapped the disk drives between the LifeBook &
600E.  I needed to tweak the XF86Config a little, and the machine was up
& running FreeBSD.

(I later re-installed FreeBSD on the other disk drive, then swapped
back.)

Based on that empirical evidence (as well as other disk-drive swaps
I've done since, though none of the others involved a ThinkPad),
I'd suggest that it's quite likely that as long as the form factor
(thickness, in this case) is OK, the drive should be fine.

Note that the TravelStar line of drives (that IBM made for laptops) is
now a Hitachi brand.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
I resent spammers because spam is a DoS attack on my time.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key.