Acer Z5700 all in one is there a limit on the size of the hard drive

neil1809

Hi ,

I have an Acer Aspire all in one Z 5700. Spec is i3 intel 540, 7 gb ram, Windows 10 64 bit. It has a Western digital hard drive 640 gb. I have run out of hard disk space and want to change it to a 1 or tb hard drive. My question is , is there a limit on the size of the hard drive or will any size work ok?

Thanks, Neil

[Edited the thread to add issue detail]

billsey

No limit other than your pocketbook. I would really suggest a SSD instead of a HDD as the replacement. If you run out of room with a 640GB then likely a 2TB will do a good job for you. Your Z5700 is around 12 years old now, so a lot of the newer technologies aren't available on it, such as M.2 interface drives. You do have a SATA connection used by your current drive, and it's designed for a 3.5" drive. To do the upgrade you are going to need a few things. First is a new SSD, it will likely be a 2.5" instead of 3.5", so an adapter to allow for mounting it is needed as well. Next is something to let you have both drives connected at the same time, so an external drive case. If you want to repurpose the existing drive as an external then get a 3.5" case, if you don't care about the old drive then a 2.5" case is likely to be cheaper. You only have USB 2.0 ports on your system, so the cheapest enclosure is likely good enough.

Once you have everything together, but then new SSD in the external case and connect it to your computer. Use most any of the drive cloning apps (I used Macrium Reflect free the last time I did this) to clone the internal drive to the external. Verify before starting the actual clone that the only partition it will resize is your system partition (C: drive). Let the clone process run to completion, it will likely take several hours, so maybe overnight is best? Once it's done then you will need to open up the computer:

Note there are two screw types there, so keep them separate

From there it should be obvious how to replace with the new drive. Once the new one is in place go ahead and reassemble and it should boot up, likely asking for a BIOS save to recognize the new drive size. Once you are back in Windows your C: drive should be much larger.