More space

With a 60GB / 7200 hard drive, my Thinkpad T43 didn't have an amazing storage capacity by today's standards. The XP install and my applications, took up closer to 30Gb, so with the bare basics, I ended up with a 50% filled up HDD. With all my private files stored there, I would have exceeded the recommended 75% limit. So I chose to keep all my mp3 files, videos and pictures on an external Seagate USB drive. The Seagate is slim and is USB powered, so it was easy to bring along and connect when I was on the go.

Still, I kept running into annoying issues. The T43 has only 2 USB ports, so when I used an external keyboard and a mouse, I couldn't use the drive. I also like to have my files backed up, so I had to copy them onto a second external drive as well, instead of just keeping them on my local drive and backed up on one external drive. So a bigger hard drive in the T43 would be very convenient for me.

Luckily I consulted my friends at forum.thinkpads.com, and it turned out that a bigger hard drive in the T43 wasn't as straight-forward as you would think. As opposed to the older T40/41/42 laptops, the T43 has a chipset with Serial ATA interfaces, but a SATA / PATA bridge chip is used to make this work with older Parallel ATA drives. (Or simply ATA drives, as this was refered to in the old days) This was a stepstone in the transition to SATA drives: Chipsets with SATA interfaces were developed, but IBM did for some reason chose to stick with the PATA drives. I read somewhere they were afraid of running out of SATA drives if they were to implement them in the T43, but I don't know if that's true.

A Thinkpad hard drive. Basically a small box, with magnetic plates turning at 7200 rpm inside it.

This causes some problems. Whether it's due to special requirements for the SATA / PATA bridge, or if IBM simply chose to do it this way is unknown to me. But the T43 doesn't accept other than IBM approved hard drives. The use of non-proprietary drives causes the laptop to give a 2010 error and loud beeps at POST. By using the latest BIOS update, the BIOS can be set to bypass the error and continue booting, but you have introduced an error to the system. Everything will work like it's supposed to in other ways, but I wasn't interested in doing this.

Another option could be to buy a hard drive adapter for the UltraBay. This is the bay where the optical reader is located, but this can also be used for a secondary hard drive or a secondary battery. Because this runs from a pure PATA IDE interface, you can basically put any drive in here and it will work with no error. But I wasn't interested in sacrificing my CD-R unit, so that was out of the question. So I was left with the option of getting an IBM approved hard drive, which are limited to 120GB in size and actually hard to find these days since they are not manufactured anymore.

Luckily there are people on the forum that runs their own little Thinkpad business, and I got a message from Brad, who had a brand new 100GB / 7200 rpm Lenovo labeled drive to sell me. The price wasn't too bad, and this gave me exactly what I was looking for. The drive was paid by check, and arrived a couple of days later. Still in a sealed bag inside a sealed box. So definitely never used. To be able to use the drive straight away, I booted up from a Clonezilla cd and put an image of my existing drive onto the Seagate drive. Then I installed my new hard drive and put the image back on the new drive. And it worked! Since the image was an exact copy of the old drive, the C: was still only 60GB. So I had to download an application to extend my partition to 100GB. Then I was ready to go. And what a relief to just open Windows Explorer and browse my pictures and mp3's without attaching the external drive. And thanks to Brad for the help!