Well what about in a laptop, say you have a 250gb but want 320gb or higher can this be done or does it depend on the cpu or motherboard
Any laptop capable of using a 250Gb drive can use the largest drive currently available for a laptop -- 1Tb without any problems.
There are no constraints at this smaller size with anything that would handle a 250Gb drive -- the issue comes in once you get to 2.2Tb and have to use a GPT partitioned drive rather than MBR, due to limitations in the number of clusters/sectors that can be addressed. For Windows that means a UEFI rather than old BIOS and a 64 bit OS to be able to use it as a boot drive.
Boot drive or data drive? You need a UEFI bios and 64 bit Vista or Windows 7 (in the MS world) to boot from 3Tb drives. Pretty much anything that is not really ancient will boot off a 2Tb drive.
Well what about in a laptop, say you have a 250gb but want 320gb or higher can this be done or does it depend on the cpu or motherboard
Any laptop capable of using a 250Gb drive can use the largest drive currently available for a laptop -- 1Tb without any problems.
There are no constraints at this smaller size with anything that would handle a 250Gb drive -- the issue comes in once you get to 2.2Tb and have to use a GPT partitioned drive rather than MBR, due to limitations in the number of clusters/sectors that can be addressed. For Windows that means a UEFI rather than old BIOS and a 64 bit OS to be able to use it as a boot drive.
Great info, it threw me off because I asked HP support what max size hard drive I can get and they told me the motherboard can only handle up to 250gb. I like to put higher drives in when I fix laptops. thanks for the info