This is harder with shock-mounted disks, especially in space-limited areas. You'll notice the small, Z-series notebooks can't be upgraded easily - you have to fiddle for ages working out how the plastic pops off the metal then peel the whole thing apart, disconnecting several ribbon cables. Definitely warranty-voiding (I as pretty afraid of breaking it, and in theory I know what I'm doing).

It's a trade off between engineering cost (& so production cost) & convenience. The fact is, with disks getting bigger all the time it soon won't be so much of an issue - if there standard empeg was 100GB, almost noone would want to upgrade it, it'd just be big enough.

Hugo