Taking the stigma out of installing a notebook hard drive. Let our CPU3D team show you how it's done ... the easy way.

INTRODUCTION

Thanks to our CPU3D review team, we're able to bring yet another EXCLUSIVE review only available right here at CPU3D. In this review we will be taking a look at the Fujitsu's 120Gb 2.5" SATA hard drive, model no: MHV2120BH. We will also show you, our step-by-step guide on how to backup your precious data, remove the old hard drive, install the new one, configure and restore the data back onto the new hard drive.

You can never get enough of hard drive space. Just when you thought your 80Gb or 120Gb is more than enough, when all of a sudden ... your system tells you have haven't got enough hard drive space! This quite often happens to desktop PCs, where users have been downloading MP3s, movies and games ... all this adds up to endless gigabytes of data.

       

Generally, notebook users have the luxury of running software and other applications only when they need it, so you don't waste unecessary space on your hard drive. There's no need to install games, transfer a ton of movies or MP3s, because a notebook is meant to be mobile, for users on the move. Most notebook users will have another desktop PC at home for things like that.

Still, as more and more consumers shift over notebooks, so will the need to satisfy their requirements. More memory, more hard drive capacity and more processing power. Nowadays, we are seeing notebooks with 512Mb or 1Gb of ram and 80Gb - 100Gb hard drive as standard. It was a very different story only few years ago, when notebooks had a maximum hard drive of 40Gb and 256Mb of ram. I personally think that a notebook should have at least a 80Gb hard drive, that's more than adequate for today's use.

       

Our Toshiba Satellite Pro U200 notebook came with a 60Gb hard drive, which I think is OK. But I needed a bigger hard drive, that's why I decided to install a 120Gb. The Fujitsu MHV2120B hard drive is equipped with the newer SATA interface for notebooks, operates at 5,400rpm, has a massive 8Mb of cache and an average seek time of 12ms. 

I'm not expecting any boost in terms of speed or performance, but I am expecting a lot more hard drive space for storing my precious data :) It also gives me the opportunity to partition my hard drive so that I can have the OS on one partition, applications and data on the another partitions.

Ok, Let's take a closer look at the Fujitsu MHV2120B 120Gb 2.5" SATA hard drive and show you our step-by-step guide for installing a notebook hard drive.