I decided to upgrade the hard drive for the DV8000 as well as add the second drive that it would accept. I ordered a pair of Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 drives… 7200 RPM 100GB drives… As for the drives themselves… Wow wow wow… Very fast. Rate out as a 5.1 for Vista’s experience rating.
Something disappointing is that HP doesn’t supply a drive caddy for the second drive… When I searched the web I found quite a few folks who ran into that as well as questions on where do you even get one??? I hunted all over the HP website and couldn’t find the caddies/frames/trays by themselves. Only could find it with a drive and I already had the exact drive I wanted…
So I looked around and luckily found http://newmode.us who has drive caddies for all sorts of laptops. The caddy was only $28.00 which was a steal compared to other places I found it at which was $50 minimum. I ordered the caddie and it was delivered and it plugged right in perfectly. The caddy came with all of the screws it need. The only thing I didn’t get with the drive or the caddy was the darn jumper. I realized I didn’t really need it though, I ended up just jumpering one drive and that was enough. Why HP couldn’t have included that caddy with the laptop or had it easily available on their website is beyond me.
Now I am running Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista Ultimate (and preparing to load Longhorn and BSD 6) on the laptop quite nicely. I also put Office 2007 on it to check that out as well.
joe
Hi Joe,
First and foremost thanks for great tools – I wish I had the opportunity to use them some more but I’ve moved from IT to being Mr Mom so there you go! Anyway, I bought the HP DV9000 notebook recently and discovered the ‘missing’ second drive bracket and connector so I rang HP and pushed them over it so they credited me $35 which was great (that was this morning and the price on their web site was $28 – they are now selling it as a single item – P/N is 434106-001). So that was great but now ordering online tonight I see they have increased the price up to $39 🙂
I guess the Chinese are paying their workers a couple of cents more per hour now so they felt the need to pass the cost on. Bad decision for HP to be cheap about that part, great stuff for the credit and then really bad to squeeze us for $11 more just for the hell of it.
More people need to call up and complain!
Cheers.
~Andrew.
newmode electronics definitely has a lot of caddies! at such great prices too! thanks for the heads up joe!!
I am feeling the pain now…my HP dv9205 has an empty bay, longing to be filled. I know it is a marketing scam to try and get you to only buy from them…which makes me want to buy from them even less. I probably wouldn’t mind buying from them if I also had the option to buy elsewhere…so now the search for a better deal (and hard drive)is on!
I ran into the same problem, talked with hp support for close to two hours while they tried to figure out what was going on. finally came back and told me that I two options 1) purchase the kit for 145 (same part number as above 434106-001 ) or pay 220 for an 80 gig hard drive that comes with the kit. A little extravagant as i can buy a 250 gig drive from WD for 90.00 which is what I planned on doing. going third party for a drive kit doesn’t void the warranty does it?