The drives we sell are NEW.  Some of our competitors sell Refurbished drives, offer free shipping & claim the drives have a "lifetime" warranty.  Don't be fooled.  IBM, Toshiba, & Fujitsu offer a 3 year warranty, not "lifetime" warranty.  New drives are ATA100 drives, not ATA66.  These companies have been selling on the internet for less than 1 year.  Will they really be around to cover the "lifetime" warranty?

Will Our Hard Drives Work in Your Laptop?

1. Size

All notebook hard drives have the same length, width, & pin interface.  The physical height of notebook hard drives vary by manufacturer, capacity and date of production. The heights of notebook drives range from 8.5mm to 19mm. Most notebook/laptop computers manufactured in the last 6 years will accept a hard drives of  12.5mm or less. Some manufacturers of very thin notebook computers can only use 9.5mm notebook hard drives. The 9.5mm drives are typically used in notebook computers manufactured in the past 2 years.

If your notebook currently has a 12.5mm drive or larger, it will work fine with either a 9.5mm or 12.5mm hard drive.  If your notebook currently has a 9.5mm drive, it will only work with a 9.5mm.

2. Screw Hole Alignment

Notebook hard drive manufacturers changed the location of the screw holes on drives around 1997 with the release of some 2.1GB hard drives.  The newer drives have screws on the outside of the drive like this:

If your notebook computer currently has hard drive of 2.1GB or smaller, this issue may affect you.   If your notebook currently has a hard drive of 3GB or larger, the mounting screw holes should be the newer pattern & this issue does not affect you.

If your current hard drive has the old screw-hole pattern, you may need to replace your hard drive caddy, drill holes in your existing caddy, or use double-stick tape to hold a newer drive in place (the double-stick tape should work fine if the drive interfaces with a flexible cable).

3. BIOS Limitations

An important issue when upgrading your notebook computer is whether your current BIOS will support the larger hard drive. Often notebook manufacturers have programmed BIOSs with a limitation of 8.5GB.  So that if you install a 20GB hard drive, the system will only recognize the drive as 8.5GB.

If your current notebook hard drive is 8GB or smaller, you may have a BIOS limitation.  If your system has a drive larger than 8GB, then your BIOS should be able to recognize drives up to 40GB.

There are 2 solutions to this problem.  You can obtain an upgraded BIOS from the notebook manufacturer & "flash" your BIOS. You can try going to the manufacturer's website and downloading the latest BIOS upgrade if available & install it on your system.

If an upgrade BIOS is not available, you can use special "drive overlay software" to override the BIOS limitation. Some suggestions are EZ Drive, available at: http://www.storagesoft.com    EZ Drive should work with any notebook system to get around a BIOS limitation.  An alternative is to download Disk Manager 2000 from IBM at:  http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm#diskmgr2k

How Do I Transfer My Data from the Current Drive?

By popular demand, XtraDisk is now offering a data transfer kit rental to allow you to copy the contents of your old hard drive onto your new drive.

Very easy to use. Simply plug one end of the cable into your PCMCIA slot & the other into your new hard drive. Insert the data transfer software diskette into your floppy drive, boot your system, hit OK, and watch the contents of one drive get copied to the other. Switch out the old drive for the new one, and you're done.

The data transfer software supports the following operating systems: Windows 95 FAT16, Windows 95 OSR2 FAT16 & FAT32, Windows 98 FAT16 & FAT32, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows NT (FAT16, Dual Boot, FAT16 w/ 64 clusters & NTFS), OS/2 (FAT16, FAT16 Dual Boot & HPFS), Windows 3.x, and all versions of DOS.

The price includes free shipping to and from you. We include the return postage for your convenience. Rental is for 2 weeks allowing you plenty of time to upgrade your drive & return the kit to us.

(Data Transfer Kit rental only available when you purchase a notebook drive from XtraDisk.)

Upgrade Services We Provide

At LTG Technology we believe in providing a total hard drive upgrade solution at a fixed price. Each of our hard drive upgrades include the following services:

• Basic System Check
• File/Data Check on Existing Hard Drive
• BIOS Upgrade (if necessary and available)
• Partition Setup on New Drive (including diagnostics, suspend, etc.)
• File/Data Transfer from Old Drive to New Drive
• Removal of Old Drive & Installation of New Drive
• Hard Drive Burn-in & Testing
• Notebook Packaged & Shipped Back

Our Pricing

* Prices include complete upgrade with all shipping costs

*2-3 Day Service: You ship your notebook to us UPS Next Day Air.  We receive it the next day & upgrade within 24hours, hopefully the same day, & return ship it to you UPS Next Day Air.  If you ship it to us on Monday, you receive it back on Wednesday or Thursday.

*5-6 Day Service:  Same as above except your notebook is shipped UPS 2nd Day Air both ways.

 Prices effective as of 10/24/05