what HDD interface do I need for my old laptop?

[thomsbrain]

What HDD interface should a replacement drive be for a 5-year old laptop? I know it predated serial ATA by a year or so. Does that mean I need "ATA-6"? Anyone know of any 7200+ RPM drives still available in the old interface?

Background: I have a ~5-year old Sager laptop with the original 60 GB 7200 RPM drive. I am constantly running out of disk space due to Microsoft's endless Windows updates taking up gigs and gigs of space, so I'm looking to replace the drive. The rest of the laptop still works fine for my needs.

Thanks in advance.

 

[heymrdj]

Originally posted by: thomsbrain
What HDD interface should a replacement drive be for a 5-year old laptop? I know it predated serial ATA by a year or so. Does that mean I need "ATA-6"? Anyone know of any 7200+ RPM drives still available in the old interface?

Background: I have a ~5-year old Sager laptop with the original 60 GB 7200 RPM drive. I am constantly running out of disk space due to Microsoft's endless Windows updates taking up gigs and gigs of space, so I'm looking to replace the drive. The rest of the laptop still works fine for my needs.

Thanks in advance.

Microsofts endless updates are good about cleaning up after themselves. They rarely cause this problem except for during their install. I would recommend disc cleanup, disk defrag to clear up some possibly locked up space. Other than that store less sh!t.

Finally, I couldn't find any 7200's for that interface, i wasn't aware there ever was any, but I guess there'd have to be somewhere.

Plenty o' the 5400's though. http://www.newegg.com/Product/...StoreType=&srchInDesc=

 

[thomsbrain]

OK, I was able to confirm that it uses ATA-6 (just took the damn thing apart to look). I ordered myself a 250 GB drive and an enclosure for the old one, that ought to do the trick.

The old drive was a Hitachi 7200 RPM 60 GB drive with an 8 MB cache.

I'm disappointed that there aren't any 7200 RPM drives around anymore, though. 5 years later, and the fastest ATA-6 drives available have SLOWER seek times than my current drive? WTF?

 

[RebateMonger]

IDE 7200 RPM laptop drives were never a great seller as a replacement drive. They used more power and had potential power issues with some laptops. Both Seagate and Hitachi made them, but it looks like Seagate stopped with the 7200.2 Momentus series. Their largest laptop IDE 7200 rpm drive was 80 GB.

The largest Hitachi IDE 7200 RPM laptop drive was 100 GB. Newegg.com (deactivated) listing page.

As noted above, you can remove all the "uninstall" files for Windows Updates, greatly reducing the overhead for Windows Updates. Take a look at the Recycle Bin, any custom Recycle Bin manager (Norton), and System Restore files, too.

 

[thomsbrain]

The Sager is running a desktop's Pentium 4 3.2, so the 7200 RPM drive was the least of its power worries. With dual batteries, I get about 30 minutes of power these days (the batteries aren't what they used to be).

I will delete those uninstall files to tide me over until the drive arrives. I am down to 3 MB. That's megabytes, not gigs!