ASUS G73JW Harddisk Upgrade

[helldragoon]

Hi I have this Asus G73Jw with a st95005620as hard disk that has an error and it says that I have to change the hard disk.

Im thinking that I wanted to upgrade my harddisk instead to buy the same one.

Im thinking to buy st750lx003 or st9750420as which has bigger capacity or maybe even upgrade it to SSD but I am not really sure are those hard disk compatible to my laptop.

So what do you guys suggest?

Sorry if Im not clear of have any mistakes. It is my first post in this forum. Thanks for your help!

[sarge_]

Any 2.5" SATA HDD, SSD or HHD that is no more than 9.5mm tall will work.

[helldragoon]

Thanks Sarge.

[Yiddo]

Highly recommend going for an SSD if you are replacing the HDD. The SSD is single handedly the best performance upgrade you can get for that model, from very fast boot times to a big increase in load times and copy/moving files.

It may not seem like much until you have one and experience it yourself.

G73JH SSD for a Newb if you are new to SSD's like I was a while back. Your JW Supports the same SATA II.

[helldragoon]

Thanks Yiddo. I've been looking on your post about the SSD and Im thinking is Crucial M4 SSD 128GB good and compatible for my G73? Coz I find it have 0.4" height which is around 10cm i think..

[Cylphid]

That Crucial will work fine. Agreed with Yiddo also, the SSD upgrade is HUGE in term of performance, you'll love it.

Keep in mind there are some tweaks you will want to do after installing it, to extend the life of the drive.

Win 7 automatically enabled trim for me and disabled defrag. I also disabled indexing, search and system restore both to save drive space and minimize the number of writes.

[helldragoon]

Thanks Cylphid. But what do you mean by the "tweaks"? Can you tell me what should I do? and do you mean that all SSD's will be broken quickly?

[tijo]

Even if you don't tweak, the SSD will outlast the laptop most likely and even if the SSD doesn't outlast the laptop, you'll have replaced it for a newer model long before the SSD fails. All you need to make sure of is that TRIM is enabled and that defrag is disabled. The rest is up to you whether you want to do it or not. Personally, i only disabled hibernation, system restore and moved the paging file to another drive, but that is mainly to save space more that extending the life of the drive.

[Cylphid]

Originally Posted by helldragoon

Thanks Cylphid. But what do you mean by the "tweaks"? Can you tell me what should I do? and do you mean that all SSD's will be broken quickly?

Oh not at all! Sorry if I misled you there.

Drives have a limited number of times they can be written to - when windows is running, certain things always write to the drives, like indexing. Indexing is to speed windows up, but because SSDs are so fast anyway, they don't need indexing, so disabling it stops those writes from happening.

Now, the number of writes will last a long time anyway, but every bit we can get from our hardware counts. I want my things to last as long as possible.

Here is what I do after installing the drive.

-Install Windows 7 + drivers + updates
-disable indexing and search
-verify TRIM is on - it should be.
How can i know if TRIM command is working on windows 7 x64? - Microsoft Answers

-verify defrag is disabled.

I'm sure I forgot something lol, but that's the basics. But the drive, if not faulty, will last you a good long time.

EDIT: tijo beat me to it, be he added some good tips too.

[Yiddo]

Forgot to mention an SSD is punch proof proven. A mechanical HDD is not.

Consider this if you play games such as Jagged Alliance 2 or Orcs Must Die and suffer from man rage.