I have a HP Pavilion dv7-6b55dx, and I want to replace my secondary hard drive. I was taking part old laptops and I got two 2.5 form factor hard drives. One is 40GBs and the other is 60GBs at 5400RPM.
I have two hard drive bays and I was wondering if I could put in the other one. Right now I have 2 hard drives in already, the first is for general use. The other hard drive is my recovery drive. I used it once when I screwed up my bios and it made my PC slow.
The recovery drive is 18GBs I was really wondering if I should replace it for more space. I do recordings and I heard that if you are reading one 1 disk and writing on another it speeds up your proformance. I would either use it for writing fraps files to it or rendering to it. Should I replace it? I don't know what will happen.
I have TWO hard drive bays they are BOTH in use. My PRIMARY hard drive is for general use and my SECONDARY hard drive is for RECOVERY for a factory image restore. I was asking if I should take out my recovery drive and and put in a 40 and 60 gig hard drive.
You do realise there isn't actually a second HDD in this laptop. After having a quick google (as i thought it was fishy) there is no spec anywhere that says there is a second HDD. The "2nd" HDD you are seeing is actually just a partition on the single HDD.
Many compaines do this, as a fail safe. As to them it's easier to tell a customer to run the restore utility rather then re-install an OS and all the drivers.
If you need a second HDD you could look at converting the CD tray into a HDD bay instead.
I looked and instead of just looking at the caddy I unscrewed it and found no hard drive. I have a secondary hard drive caddy but no wire. I need to get the wire then I can install. I didn't want to remove the hard drive unitl I knew what I was dealing with.
I'm sorry to tell you man but this laptop only has one physical drive. Like others have said there is nothing on any website or dissassebly video stating/hinting/showing that it has two separate harddrives. You have two partitions which are on the same drive. This is setup from the factory in order to circumvent the need for recovery discs in the event of needing to do a factory restore. I've never seen a laptop in this price range in my over 10 years of PC sales/marketing that has offered two separate harddrives. Generally only high-end gaming laptops (kind of an oxymoron) have two separate harddrives as an option. And those that do have dual hardrive support, will DEFINITELY not make you buy a separate part in order to use them. They either come with two preinstalled separately from the factory, or they have a dual stack harddrive cage that you simply plug/screw another on into.
EDIT: Well fuck me running.. I might be wrong. http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-e-g-Windows-8/Dual-Hard-drive-in-dv7-laptops/td-p/136067