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I would buy a large laptop (17 inch display) and would hope for it to be able to accommodate two velociraptor hard disk drives that I would set up in a RAID 0 array.

How can I tell which laptops accomodate two hard disks and have a RAID controller?

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I'm not a laptop person, but I'd be surprised if laptop manufacturers left space for a second HDD. Space is too much of a premium in laptops. –  pavium Nov 14 '09 at 11:19
@pavium, there are some upper end laptops, such as gaming laptops that have 2 Hard drives in them, but otherwise the laptop would not likely come with provision for an extra HDD –  Jonno_FTW Nov 14 '09 at 11:23
I see. A 'gaming laptop' sounds like a very exotic animal to me. I'd go with wazoox's datasheet idea, but leave the screwdriver at home. –  pavium Nov 14 '09 at 11:42
laptops that can accommodate 2 hard drives usually do so by default, unless the manufacturer is selling a lower spec varaint of the model. so. look for laptops that do have 2 hard drives by default, you can replace them with your velociraptors (or better with SSDs, raid0 + velociraptor sounds like 'need for speed' and there is simply no platter hard drive matching the performance of a decent solid state disk, raid or no raid) –  Molly7244 Nov 15 '09 at 2:35
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4 Answers

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I know for a fact that laptops can have two hard drives. I recently upgraded a Gateway my friend has from Vista to Windows 7 and his laptop can have two drives. The way you could spot it on his is that it had two areas marked with a storage logo, looked like this:

Storage Icon

So if you are going to be looking at the laptops physically that might be one way of making sure. If this is all done online, I know Dell allows you to select another hard drive during the customization part if this can be done. You can also type the model number of the laptop you are looking at in Google and the spec sheet will provide you with expansion information.

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Is there supposed to be a barely visible spiral on it? –  Hello71 Jul 27 '10 at 23:52
Yes, there's supposed to be a watermark. Smartass. –  Marcin Aug 23 '10 at 23:10
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Any laptop that has an optical drive can have two HDD's, but it requires replacing the optical drive with a cradle that fits the second HDD. There are kits available for example for the non-retina macbook pro's that do this, and I imagine there's similar kits for other brands of laptop.

If the laptop natively supports two HDD's the above "trick" can be used to add a third HDD to it.

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They exist. The only ones I've seen are basically desktop replacement machines--big, heavy, not meant to be used in a portable fashion. They're meant to be hauled from point A to point B, plugged in and used. Most of these are gaming machines.

The only way you'll know about a particular machine is to look it up.

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Look at the datasheet. The only other way around is to pry the thing open at the store with a screwdriver but I'm afraid it wouldn't end so well.

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No it wouldn't. [ end so well ] –  Andrei Rinea Nov 14 '09 at 12:02
The data sheets say nothing about drive bays. Should look for other key words? –  Andrei Rinea Nov 14 '09 at 12:03
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