Yesterday I was talking to a Lenovo/IBM Technician because I want to know what type of hard drive is in my laptop. I want to purchase a backup drive in case this one fails (part of my disaster recovery plan). The technician tells me I have a SATA drive. Great, MicroCenter is selling a Western Digital 200GB SATA laptop drive for US$60. I was floored by the price so I plan to buy two of them and increase the storage on my machine by 80GB. I need the room. {g}
Then she asks me why I want to know. I explain my requirements to have a back up drive. She goes off for a minute to do something and comes back with “the best drive we have is a 100GB 7200 rpm drive.”
No thanks IBM. She then tells me I have to purchase an IBM Drive because my Lenovo Z61P laptop only takes IBM components. What?!? Seriously?!? I ask her what the deal is, and what is it that possessed Lenovo to architect a laptop to only accept IBM components? Was she pulling my leg? I told her if this is true it is the last Lenovo laptop I am purchasing, period. She could not give me the exact details of why the laptop requires an IBM drive. In fact, I believe she does not know what she is talking about and is reading some script. Stoopid. She said the same thing about memory and I already put in third party memory into a Lenovo laptop.
Do you have a recent or not so recent ThinkPad, and have you upgraded your hard drive?
We have a T40, an X31p and an X21p and none have the original laptop HDD. These are commodity items and I doubt IBM makes drives not interchangeable with everyone else.
Note, though, that ThinkPads are not manufactured by IBM, but by Lenovo. I think next year they have to stop using the IBM logo on the corner. They are great machines, in daily use (the 21p for 6.5 years!) and I hope Lenovo can maintain the quality.
I don’t have a Lenovo and I don’t think that what I’m about to say applies to you, however: I have seen some laptops and tablets that are using the 1.5 inch drives and they appear to have proprietary connections.
Now, something that might apply to you – sometimes the machines will take larger capacity drives, but the machines were not spec’d to handle the potential additional heat. (Former employee Mike told me that the larger capacity drives can consume more power and create more heat than the machine was designed to handle.)