Hard Drive Upgrade Question

ginky4

Member
Oct 11, 2000
161
0
0
I have a Compaq Presario 4784. The hard drive got fried. It was a 4.3gig. The computer has 80 megs of ram and a 200mgtz processor. I was thinking about upgrading the Hard Drive to a 40 gig 7200 rpm EIDE Western Digital. It has Ultra ATA/100 and Ultra ATA/66 interfaces. Will this hard drive work ok on this older model Compaq? Let me know. Thanks!
 

MichaelD

Lifer
Jan 16, 2001
31,528
3
76
Yes, the hard drive will work. That is the simple answer. The slightly more in-depth answer is that your older Compaq most likely has an ATA33 interface, so the hard drive will only work at that speed. The equivalent would be driving a Porsche 911 Turbo at 70mph. Yes, it's working, but that's not all it's capable of. Most HD's these days are ATA66/100. They are backwards compatible with ATA33 systems.

Get a good HD. Maxtor DiamondMax series comes to mind. It will last you a good long time, this way, you can take it with you when your Compaq dies! ;) Good luck.
 

bacillus

Lifer
Jan 6, 2001
14,517
0
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<< Will this hard drive work ok on this older model Compaq? >>


the drive will work as the ata standard is backwards compatible. I assume your m/board ide controller is ata33(=udma2) so the drive will do transfers at that speed &amp; not at ata100.
a word of caution though as your present bios may not be new enough to see the full size of that hdd so try to get the latest bios update for your m/board. :)
 

Gunbuster

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
6,852
23
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Cross your fingers, some of that style compaq got very freaky when you went past 4.3gig

You may need to make the system floppys to load the &quot;Bios&quot; onto the new drive