Is it possible to increase the hard drive space on a laptop? If so, what is the maximum amount?

Question

I have a Sony Viao laptop, and I believe that the C drive sorage amount is 13.6 GB. (That's what's written when I check out the stats on My Computer)

Answer 1

There are several options. Since no one else is saying all of them, I will:

1) A new internal hard drive. Unless Sony used some obscure and non-standard brand of hard drive, you should be able to swap it out for a new one with more capacity. You'll have to save what's on the disk before installing a new one, but a new drive can be installed fairly quickly. If you're off the warranty or there aren't any good replacements, try some other ideas below.

2) An external hard drive. Portable USB microdrives as small as 2.5" can be attached and detached as necessary. The speed is sufficient with USB 2.0 that you won't notice much of a slowdown. You can get them as large as 40GB, but you'll pay a lot of $$$ for it.

3) A DVD+RW drive, either USB or internal. I have an external drive attached via USB 2.0 and swap data on and off my hard drive as necessary (eg. MP3s, TV shows recorded as MPEGs). It takes a few minutes to swap data, but if you're not doing it often, the speed is acceptable. They're limited to 4.7GB of storage and they're large, but they're cheap nowadays and have multiple uses (DVD, CD, storage, portability, etc.) which is why I prefer this one.

4) Memory cards. They're fairly fast and can be swapped in and out with ease on your USB port, and can carry more data and are smaller and faster than CDs or floppies. The downside is their memory size: I haven't seen one larger than 4GB, and some tend to overheat if left plugged in for long periods of time (Imation is high quality and my FlashRAM card has this problem).

There might be others, but these are the most likely you'll use based on price and availability.


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Answer 2

You have a couple of different options. You can replace the hard drive. The problems with this are: 1. You have to talk to Sony to see what will fit in the laptop. 2. it will most likely be a customer install which means you'd have to take the computer apart and install it yourself. That's not a good route to take since laptops are very complex.

The other option and the one I would go with is to buy a USB external hard drive and save your stuff to it.

Answer 3

Just replace the hard drive, or in some cases, you can add another one. I think the biggest that sony makes is an 80 gb, which is way more than enough space usually. It might run you up some money though.

Answer 4

To a certain degree.
Hardware wise no.
You can remove all programs that you don't use and the freeware/shareware that you won't use.
You could partion your drive and make a data drive. You could compress whatever files you rarely use. Your computer performance will suffer.
Next time you reimage your computer, see how much of your hard drive is available. For example 60 GB after reformatting 50 GB free (10 GB used for Windows & 3rd party software) remove all other shareware.

Answer 5

In order to increase hard drive space, you can remove necessary applications or delete temporary internet files, that could save you some spaces. However, the best solution is buy a bigger capacity 2.5" hard drive (i.e. 40 GB or 60GB), it's much cheaper now.

Answer 6

Yes. Replace it with a larger hard drive. Get a local store like buffalo.com to upgrade it 4 ya. You could check to see if the drive is compressed. It prob. is though.

Answer 7

yes!
you need to unscrew the back of your laptop and take the old hard drive out and put the new one. (( DON"T unscrew hole area, just do the space that you guess there should be a hard drive.))

there is no limitation for doing it, 250 GB or 40000 GB doesn't matter.

my suggestion,
get external hard drive, which is easy and usable for future.

Answer 8

you can replace it with a bigger one
i put a 80 gigats instead of a 40 into my laptop
but you can always get an external hard drive that has 300 or more ,which you connect with a USB cable
Check the name -Maxtor -in the browser

Answer 9

you can double your space , install XP with NTFS full space partition , then reboot booting with a win98 or ME Disk then enable large partions HD support and create one partition ( 100% of storage ) and it will create teh same HD capacity in a new partion called D: .. reboot and format it using windows XP on desktop .. nice luck , for further assitance , just send me an e-mail and I[ll do my impossible to assist you ..

Answer 10

If it has a USB port, you can get a memory stick and plug it in - not sure how big the biggest one is, but they're pretty roomy!