> Aside: I usually don't buy (or even consider) things like refurbished disk
> drives (what do they do, repolish the disk surfaces? ;-) (I'm being
> facetious)) or devices like laptops that include disk drives -- partly because
> of what I read once about adding memory and replacing the disk drive in a
> recent HP laptop (in the old days, it was easy) -- early in the instructions
> it talked about the need to remove something like 56 screws -- but after
> (later) reading a little more , it really depended on how much you wanted to
> replace.
I strongly recommend buying refurbished laptops, as long as they're
good/reliable laptops: not only you save a lot of money, but also it
gives you slightly-older laptops which makes sure Debian has had time to
work out-of-the box in it, and on top of it all, you help reduce the
enormous ecological impact of our crazy consumption of electronic
gadgets (e.g. the production of a laptop consumes more energy than
what the laptop will ever consume during its whole lifetime).
On all the thinkpads I know, the 2½ drive can be swapped by removing
a single screw (tho admittedly, this single screw lets you remove the
drive + "caddy" and if you want to change the drive, you then needs to
remove the 4 screws that attach the drive to the "caddy").
I suspect similar things apply to many other brands.
> On a mini-PC I'm confident about my ability to replace a disk drive
> without too much trouble.
I'd expect you also need to handle 4-5 screws to remove a drive from a mini-PC.
Stefan
