HD Upgrade - Compatibility

exodus454

Senior member
Apr 11, 2004
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The HD on my brother's laptop, a Dell Latitude CSx, has gone dead and it's far past warranty. He needs the laptop for school, so I figured it would be nice to replace the drive and to get it working again. I've found what looks to be a decent hard drive, a Samsung Spinpoint 40Gb, 5400Rpm, 8Mb cache drive for about $80 on directron.com. It's the right form factor and interface and everything, but my question: before I purchase and attempt to use this drive, will a higher speed, higher capacity, non-standard drive even work? The drive in there is ~10Gb, 4200rpm (or lower?) and must have an ATA-66 or slower interface. Would the laptop subsystems be able to handle the newer drive? What about power requirements for the newer drive, would replacing it mean cutting battery life?

Like I said, the laptop is a Latitude CSx, and aside from that, I don't know much about it, so whatever help you can offer would be great, thanks.

BTW - does anyone know what kind of memory it uses? If my brother has to squeeze a few more years out of it, it'd be nice if we could upgrade that too, thanks.
 

TheCanuck

Senior member
Apr 28, 2003
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It should be able to take pretty much any 9.5mm hard drive. If you do a google search you can often find places selling upgrade kits for the Csx that are 60GB drives...these kits are just the caddy, drive and sometimes bios update but are very overpriced.

I'd also make sure you have the latest bios in the laptop though:

http://support.dell.com/suppor...&os=WW1&osl=EN

That laptop takes PC100 ram, so you can put a 256MB stick in the slot:

http://www.kahlon.com/result.a...=KDEL398&ovtac=CMP