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Laptop Hard Drives

Laptop Hard Drives holds 2.5-inch drives for notebooks and compact PCs: 5400 and 7200 RPM SATA models such as Seagate BarraCuda and WD Blue, plus the OEM-labeled drives Dell, HP and Lenovo shipped inside their notebooks. Thickness matters as much as capacity. Most laptops take 7mm or 9.5mm drives, while the highest-capacity 2.5-inch models, like Seagate's 4TB ST4000LM016, are 15mm thick and only fit external enclosures and a few roomy bays.

Laptop Hard Drives: 10,305 products

Buying guide

Before you swap a laptop drive

  1. Check the height

    Measure or look up your bay: 7mm, 9.5mm, 12.5mm or 15mm. A thinner drive can be shimmed up with a spacer; a thicker one simply won't go in.

  2. SMR at high capacities

    Many 2TB-plus 2.5-inch drives use shingled magnetic recording. That's fine in a laptop, but it slows sustained writes and makes them a poor choice for RAID or NAS rebuilds.

  3. Consider an SSD

    A 2.5-inch SATA SSD drops into the same bay and connector, and is usually the bigger upgrade. Clone the old drive first so the operating system comes across intact.

Laptop Hard Drives

Frequently asked questions

Will a 7mm drive fit in a 9.5mm bay?

Yes, usually with a plastic spacer so it doesn't rattle. The reverse doesn't work: a 9.5mm drive won't fit a bay designed for 7mm.

Can I use a laptop hard drive in a server?

It fits a 2.5-inch bay, but laptop drives aren't rated for 24/7 operation or RAID error recovery. For servers, choose drives from the server hard drive or SSD categories.