The HDD on my Acer Aspire S3 conked out a couple of days ago. Don’t know what caused it but by the time I booted it up in the morning, the hard drive was already trashing the plates like crazy. This is the first time I’ve had a laptop HDD crashed on me.
Since this is my primary laptop, I am forced to have it repaired or do the repair myself.
With the right screw driver and a spare 2.5″ 750GB Western Digital HDD lying around, I thought I could replace it myself.
After a couple of hours struggling with the dozen or so screws, I managed to peel off the back cover and removed the damaged HDD.
Problem though is that when I was placing the new HDD, it would not fit on the bay. Turns out my spare laptop HDD was thicker than the one on the Aspire S3.
A few Google searches and I found the Hitachi Travelstar Z5K320 is just 7mm thin and not the 9.5mm most other regular laptop drives are. The highest capacity for this model is actually the 320GB used by the Aspire S3 which is from Hitachi. My enthusiasm fizzled.
I now have to look for a 7mm thin HDD so I can fix the Aspire S3 and get back to my regular work schedule. Problem is this model is rare and since we have a HDD crisis, it’s going to be expensive. Just find it really strange the drive gave up just like that.
I have an Acer S3 and I was able to purchase a Seagate 320GB 2.5in 7mm HDD from V-Mall Greenhills.
Openning the S3 chassis was simple enough. Unscrew all the screws and it’s open. Cloning the HDD’s contents took a couple of hours (or so) but once swapped, the S3 booted just fine.
BTW, I noticed that using my disk partition utility that I could access the SDD. I could re-format it so I can directly access it in Windows7. But for now, I left it as is.
BTW, I replaced the original Hitachi HDD as a precaution of it failing in the near future.
Replace it with SSD.
All Intel 320 and Crucial M4 SSD has only 7mm height
@Steen Larsen:
I played with the idea of replacing the original HDD with a SSD but the cost is prohibitive to get the 256gb or higher capacity SSD.
has anyone actually installed an SSD in this ultrabook? Did you encounter any issues?