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.
