Need laptop hard drive upgrade help

[ScottyB]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1420. According to their website, I can upgrade to a hard drive with the specs listed below. I will be ordering from a third party, such as Newegg, and need to know if it is an atypical connector.

I am looking for something like this.



200 GB
Serial ATA-300
7200 rpm
1x Serial ATA-300 - 7 pin Serial ATA
1 x internal - 2.5" x 1/8H

 

[corkyg]

The drive connectors themselves are all standard, in your case SATA. Most all laptops, including Dell, put the drive in a caddy of somesort. That is what you remove from the drive. The drive is usually held in that carrier by side screws. All you need to do is remove the assembly, then the holding screws, separate the drive from the caddy, and put the new one in, and replace the screws. Then the whole enchilada slips in to the laptop where it is secured by one or two screws.

To make your operation painless, you can clone your existing drive to the new drive if you put the new one in an external case of some sort. Then, when you swap drives, you boot right up on the new drive and never lose a beat.

Good luck! You have picked a good drive. I have two of them.

 

[heymrdj]

I got the WD 3200BEVT as the secondary drive of my HP DV9550t. I love it, huge capacity and great speeds, extremely dense platters. I notice now there's the 3200BEKT out which has 16MB cache instead of 8MB cache, supposedly lowers average seek times from 12ms to 4ms. Of course your mileage may vary by application. My drive is strictly for storage so I doubt I'd see it, but maby the 50$ would be worth it for you.