Need advice for a hard drive

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Xcelerate

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So I'm a college student with a D630 laptop, and do a lot of video editing. Unfortunately, my laptop's 160GB ran out pretty quickly. So I'm looking for an upgrade, and with video editing, I would like the fastest possible hard drive I can get to work with this thing (that has a decent amount of space, so no SSDs).

I could get a new 2.5" internal hard drive and put it in the media bay slot on my laptop. But (correct me if I'm wrong) 500 GB is about the maximum for a 2.5" inch drive that still has decent performance (I think WD has a 750 or 1 TB, but these aren't as fast???)

So then my other option is putting a 3.5" internal hard drive in an enclosure and connecting it to a laptop. These 3.5" drives seem to be a ton faster than 2.5" ones. Of course, this won't be too easy because USB limits the speed to like 40 MB/s at best, so I'd want to use a SATA connection. Well, my laptop doesn't have one of those. But I do have the docking station for the laptop which supports a PCI card (why it doesn't support PCI Express I have no idea), so I was thinking maybe I could get a PCI card with an eSATA connector, and put it in the dock. Since SATA 1 supports 1.5 Gbps, this should still be enough bandwidth for a 1 or 2 TB Caviar Black, right?

So which do you think is better, settling on an internal 2.5" drive, or a 3.5" drive in an enclosure connected to a PCI card inside a dock that's connected to the laptop?

If anyone manages to read all that and has any suggestions, thanks!
 
There is at least one 7200rpm 500GB hard drive available.

But an e-SATA card would work better in the long run.
 
Yeah, I've seen that one and it seems pretty good. How does it compare to the new Hitachi 7k500? They're about the same price.
 
GeorgeHR said:
There is at least one 7200rpm 500GB hard drive available.

But an e-SATA card would work better in the long run.
Click to expand...

The express slot in the 630 is USB based so that really limits you on speed.
 
And if you can put one in the media bay slot you may be able to fit taller 2.5in disks such as the vRaptor.
Replace the OS disk with the 7200.4 500gb and put a vraptor in your media bay slot and have 800gb of space
 
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