Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

The drives spin at a very high rate of speed; a typical laptop hard drive

rotates at least 4,200 times per second, compared to 300 times per

second for a floppy disk drive.

Hard drives are sealed units, with their platters and read/write heads

protected from damage by dirt, dust, and sticky substances that could

make it literally grind to a halt.

Motherboards and hard drive controllers have advanced to the point

where they are capable of very high transfer rates for the data recorded

to or unloaded from a drive.

Desirable downsizing .........................................................................

A hard drive in a laptop is just like a hard drive in a desktop or tower computer

exceptthat it is usually much smaller, much lighter, much less demanding of

electrical power, and considerably more resistant to damage or problems

related to the fact that a laptop is specifically intended to move from place

to place.

The drives have to be smaller, of course, because they need to fit in the tight

confines of a notebook case. In a modern notebook computer, the hard drive

is about the size and weight of a pack of playing cards. Most notebooks use

drives that are two-and-a-half inches wide and a bit more than one-third inch

thick (9.5mm); today’s tiniest are just 8.5mm thick, which is almost exactly

one-third inch.

Hard drive manufacturers are already offering even smaller drives; the next

step down is a 1.8-inch-wide device that can be installed in a PC Card or as an

embedded drive within the case. The tiniest commercially available drives

Part III: Laying Hands on the Major Parts ..................

When hard drives hit the big time

The first hard drives for personal computers
were nearly the size of a shoebox and about as
heavy as a brick, and offered a storage capacity
of 5 or 10 megabytes — the capacity of just a
handful of today’s floppy disks or CDs. (But at the
time, they were considered modern marvels of
miniaturization; before the advent of the PC, hard
drives were the size of a small refrigerator.)

The IBM PC-XT, the great-great-grandfather of

nearly every desktop, notebook, and laptop

computer, came with a five-and-a-quarter-inch

wide, three-inch-tall hard drive that weighed

several pounds. These first units drew as much

as 30 watts of power and with an access speed

of 80 ns — unacceptably demanding and

painfully slow by modern standards.