Hard drive exchange for memory enlargement

Sadly most 2.5” HDD’s are now fixed speed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) as most manufactures have stopped producing SATA II drives at the higher density you are asking for. Samsung sold their HDD division to Seagate and was one of the few drive makers to produce a 2 TB disk drive Samsung Spinpoint M9T others where 12 mm and would not fit. I was using a pair in my Mac mini before I switched them out for SSD’s. I never tried using it in a SATA II system and I doubt Seagate will be able to answer as the drive is so old now and you can’t find them new any more either.

A few companies produce SSD drives which are able to used like the Samsung 860 EVO SSD As you can see in the spec sheet they support SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) from the sheet: “SATA 6 Gbps Interface, compatible with SATA 3 Gbps & 1.5 Gbps interfaces”

Now the killer the price! $400 US for a 2TB drive and $900 US for a 4 TB drive. I would think long and hard if you want to make such a large investment in such an old system for an internal drive. A 1 TB drive is a bit cheaper $200 US I would stick with that! I doubt you really need anything larger. Don’t forget to max out your RAM as well to 8 GB.

You may want to look at getting an external drive but your options are a bit limited here as well, as the older FireWire connection drives are hard to find (look at getting a bare case and adding your own drive) and the USB connection in this series is only USB2 so its slow. That leaves us with just the Ethernet connection and using a NAS which is not that portable, but! Can be quite fast is using SSD’s and the investment is transferable to anything you buy later on.