need hard drive for old dell laptop

[sleepyt79]

Hello, I have an old 450 mHz Dell Inspiron 7500, but the hard drive crashed...

Here are the specs of the original hard drive:
Fujitsu MHK2120AT 20GB 4200rpm, I don't know what kind of interface it has to connect to the laptop.

I was wondering, what kind of hard drive should I get for this. I've seen laptop hard drives with larger buffers, larger capacity, and faster rpm. Do you think a faster drive, such as the 5400 rpm or the 7200 rpm will work?

If I need to provide more information, please tell me where i can find it.

Thanks for your help!
-T

 

[Startide Rising]

The oldest Inspirons such as the 7000 had those thick notebook drives. My drive didn't crash, but I replaced the old one with newer, faster, thinner, QUIETER, and higher-capacity notebook drive from Hitachi since Fry's had a sale on them. I don't know offhand how thick your drive is, but the old ones were almost half-inch thick which was darn thick. The new thinner drives fit into the same hard drive carrier with no problem other than there was now more air space.

Dell notebooks have the drives fit into a carrier. The carrier has a removable connector adapter which attaches to the hard drive so that the carrier can then plug into the connector in the laptop main body. From looking over all the notebook drives at the Fry's viewing rack, it seems that any thin drive would fit into my old 7000.

I wouldn't spend too much money on the old laptops. If the drive costs $69 then go for it. Otherwise, you might also look at an option of getting a stripped out drive from one of the used computer stores and then running a S.M.A.R.T. check program or even a more detailed Spinrite 6 test on it to look for possible future failures. Around here, used hard drives are fairly cheap ranging from $25 to $40 for the large ones from a somewhat new model (obviously, the older the model, the older the drive and thus the cheaper the drive is). The money you save can then go towards buying an external hard drive case in which you can stuff a nice cheap 250GB hard drive. Sam's Club sells 250GB retail box WD drives for $129 everyday price (no rebate needed) or the Simpletech USB2.0 120GB external drive for $119.