Dual-hard drive laptops

RJM62

RJM62

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Jun 15, 2007
Messages
13,157
Location
Upstate New York
Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
I'm passively in the market for a laptop with a 17+ inch screen and an extra hard drive bay. I don't need RAID, just a second hard drive to use as a clone of the primary drive.

I'm partial to HP, both because I've had good experience with their machines, and because I get employee discounts through their credit union.

The problem I'm having is that it's hard to narrow the field by the second hard drive bay feature, both because it's not a popular consumer feature, and because some of the machines that do have second hard drive bays don't list that in the specs, for whatever odd reason.

Conversely, some models have what looks like a second hard drive bay, but it's just an empty space with no connections to accept a hard drive; so looking for an image of the bottom of the machine doesn't necessarily help.

Anyone know of some site or resource that would have this information readily available? It would sure beat researching every single model to try to sort them out.

I've already chatted with Bernadette, Bridget, and Grace from Bangalore (I never knew that Irish names were so popular in India!), but they didn't have the information handy either.

Otherwise, I see a three-hour drive to MicroCenter in my future. :D

Thanks.

-Rich
 
Dunno about HP's, but there's a company that had a kit for Mac laptops where you could remove the optical drive and add a second hard drive, and they included an external USB enclosure for the optical drive as part of the package. I don't see why you couldn't use it in any laptop you want, provided the optical drive mechanism is similar to the one that was used in the MacBooks the last few years (I don't know who Apple was using for that part).

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
 
I have a 4 year old dell as backup server. It has a raid, but you dont have to configure it that way.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Dunno about HP's, but there's a company that had a kit for Mac laptops where you could remove the optical drive and add a second hard drive, and they included an external USB enclosure for the optical drive as part of the package. I don't see why you couldn't use it in any laptop you want, provided the optical drive mechanism is similar to the one that was used in the MacBooks the last few years (I don't know who Apple was using for that part).

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
Click to expand...

Other World Computing, best mac place for mac stuff without the apple logo+markup. they know their stuff and I have been a customer of theirs about two decades now.
 
LDJones said:
Lenovo makes excellent machines.
Click to expand...

It is funny. When the thinkpad line was bought by the chinese, a lot of people sort of wrote them off. I have had very good service from one of their cheap series (R I believe) made after the buyout.
 
weilke said:
It is funny. When the thinkpad line was bought by the chinese, a lot of people sort of wrote them off. I have had very good service from one of their cheap series (R I believe) made after the buyout.
Click to expand...

A good friend bought one of their desktops. It's the quietest PC I've ever heard. Even in his very quiet study, you can't tell anything is running. He loves it.
 
Rich, I found it easier when on the road to just run a current Acronis. You can boot if off of Acronis, and access any of the file even if the boot track is down. USP external drive, and Optical drive. Or use any other Unix utility....but you know all this.
 
bbchien said:
Rich, I found it easier when on the road to just run a current Acronis. You can boot if off of Acronis, and access any of the file even if the boot track is down. USP external drive, and Optical drive. Or use any other Unix utility....but you know all this.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Doc. I like Acronis, too, and I use it to make images, which I save to an external drive.

But I also update the clone of the system drive almost daily, skipping it only when I made no changes that don't also exist elsewhere (Web stuff that's already been uploaded, for example). The clone is bootable and uncompressed, so it can just be swapped in for the system drive.

In fact, if the system drive crashed and I didn't have a single tool with me, I could still get the system up and running on the clone in about 90 seconds -- literally -- with a few keystrokes in BIOS.

The downside is that a cloned drive in the same machine as the system drive can get infected, or it could be taken down by the same hardware failure that took down the main drive. It could also be lost, stolen, or destroyed with the machine. That's why I explicitly don't consider the cloned drive to be backup. It's about downtime reduction and nothing more. The backup happens using both Acronis and online backup.

I know. I'm kind of a backup nut. That's because when I was still doing repairs and tech support, I never once came across a client who had too many backups. For once in my life, I was wise enough to learn my lesson vicariously.

-Rich
 
LDJones said:
Lenovo makes excellent machines.
Click to expand...

Yes, they do. But I get discounts on HP. :lol:

But seriously, once you uninstall all the crapware that comes with them, I've found HP machines to be excellent (the ones on the higher end, at least). The one I'm using now (Pavilion DV7 series) has been in daily hard use for several years, and it's been an extremely solid and dependable performer for me.

-Rich
 
weilke said:
It is funny. When the thinkpad line was bought by the chinese, a lot of people sort of wrote them off. I have had very good service from one of their cheap series (R I believe) made after the buyout.
Click to expand...

Thinkpad T or X series are the only Windows PC I will buy. Everything else is cheaply made junk.

The W's are fine but too large for my needs. But if the OP wants a 17" dual screen workstation class laptop, then the W701DS is the only game in down.

http://gizmodo.com/5477571/lenovo-t...tly-specs-with-an-integrated-secondary-screen

206279_215116795168959_5586224_n.jpg
 
MSPAviator said:
Thinkpad T or X series are the only Windows PC I will buy. Everything else is cheaply made junk.

The W's are fine but too large for my needs. But if the OP wants a 17" dual screen workstation class laptop, then the W701DS is the only game in down.

http://gizmodo.com/5477571/lenovo-t...tly-specs-with-an-integrated-secondary-screen

206279_215116795168959_5586224_n.jpg
Click to expand...

Thanks. I don't know if I need the secondary screen, but it does look like a nice machine.

Basically, I do most on my work on the laptop and only occasionally travel with it, so big is good. The weight's no issue: On those occasions when I do travel, I just count the schlepping toward my daily exercise.

-Rich
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top