Daily Archives: 26/01/2011

Jan 26 2011

12.5mm laptop hard disks not fitting a lot of laptops

My room mate asked me to upgrade his Toshiba Satellite laptop.   Its already quite new and very high spec with 6Gb of memory, Win7-64 and a Bluray drive.   It has 320Gb of disk space which is no longer big enough.   I think he bought it at the end of 2009, since then bigger disks have appeared for laptops.

Being a bit behind in physical form factor and capacity that hard drives in laptops and the heavier USB external drives, only in the last year you can now get 750 Gigabyte and 1 Terabyte disks for laptops.  Trouble is, that these drives are in the fatter 12.5mm format as opposed to 9mm disks in most laptops.   Various Dells and Toshibas in recent years have the hard disk underneath rather than a sideways mounted module which is better.

Picture shown: The battery is an extra large capacity, so the ‘foot’ raises it off the ground a bit.   A) Original 9mm high Hitachi 320Gb disk.   B) New Toshiba branded 12.5mm 1Tb disk. C) The trapdoor panel that will not fit.

Here is the problem:  the 12.5mm 1Tb drive simply does not fit in side this Toshiba.   If I fit it in loosely, gingerly turn it the right way up and power up and put the Toshiba in the BIOS mode, the disk is seen by the computer as you can see from the picture.   To be honest, its only the panel that snaps on the bottom that will not fit closed.   Its not mine, so cutting any bits off is totally out, it does look like only a few small discrete tabs on the hard disk door would need to be removed.   Nor is any bits hanging out a desirable option.   It does very very almost fit.

I bought the Toshiba 1TB 2.5″ hard disk from popular IT retailer DABS, they told me they will not accept it back as I bought it around mid December so I am stuck with it.   This is a bit unfair as they didn’t specify its a taller 12.5mm unit on their web site.

Some Google searches shows there is plenty of compatibility issues with some Dells, HPs and Apple Macbooks.   These drives won’t fit in a Playstation 3 either.

Please Toshiba, (and Dell, HP, Acer, Sony, Apple too)  can you provide some simple info in a chart of which models can use these newer cheap large disks?   All I can say is, do some thorough research if you are tempted by a big hard drive upgrades for your laptop.

Its strange that Toshiba make computers, and make parts, (hard disks, LCD panels, DVD drives)  used in other brand laptops, but my own 2006 model Toshiba Equium A100 has a Panasonic made DVD drive and a Western Digital made hard disk!!

Update:   DABS’ customer service manager let me return it with a 10% handling fee.   I have found a 9mm high 750Gb Seagate 2.5″ drive, so I am going to use this.

Jan 26 2011

Mount Hermon snow trip: Part 2, Snow patrol

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock

After much driving up and up, we took a bit of a wrong turn, and saw an Arab town and a military checkpoint ahead, then realised it was a border into Lebanon!  

Note at the time of writing this, the Lebanese government has collapsed, meaning Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation could be filling this gap as they seek to become a satellite post of Iran, threatening Israel even more.   This really needs prayer as this huge worry for Israel, and awful for the Lebanese people as well, this country has one of the largest Arab Christian communities.

We were not in any danger at all, as this checkpoint is well protected, I took this picture of some run down farm buildings out of the window which was close by.

Just a short drive later, we reached Mount Hermon!

Mount Hermon is considered a possible place of the Transfiguration, where Jesus took Peter, James and John up for prayer, and reportedly turned bright white, where he spoke with Moses and Elijah who appeared.  The scriptures reveal it was known as two other names – ‘Sirion’ by the Sidonians; the Amorites call it ‘Senir’.  Deuteronomy 3 : 9

The Bible’s own romantic style book of Song of Solomon mentions it too in versus 4 : 8 and Psalms 89 talks about Mount Hermon giving praises to the Lord too.

Only last friday I had a Shabbat dinner with a couple from my work and they had a bottle of wine the came from this exact part of the country.   After my trip to the Dead Sea which was the lowest place on earth (ie: below sea level)    Hermon is 2,814 metres high.

Once parked and we went through the visitor entrance and a initial bit of childish exploitation of the first glimpse of snow meant a snowball fight, there was some good places to get photos done:-

Woohoo!  all manner of types of military and rescue vehicles for snow use, something most people would think you would never have in Israel…

We were hoping the girls would want a photo of themselves next to some interesting piece of winter military gear here as well, but they chose a giant plastic snowman.  Tsk.

Then off onto the chairlift, yay!!!

This requires the man operating the lift to get you positioned exactly right so quickly sit down and he raises the safety bar down.   Top: someone (probably the boss I guess) has a nice collection of different snow vehicles.   Both pictures: note the strategically placed net, in case you get scooped by the chair lift by accident, or, fall out!

check out www.skihermon.co.il

Next up the slope….

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock