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71264
January 21st, 2009 19:00
Upgrade Hard Drive in Inspiron 1520?
My laptop (running Vista HP SP1) came with a 160GB Fujitsu MHY2160BH hard drive. Upon researching the drive, it seems to be a SATA 1.5Gb drive. I'd really like to put a 500GB drive in it, either the new WD Blue 500GB or the new Seagate 500GB. However, the largest capacity WD Blue drive at SATA 1.5Gb is 250GB. Hardly worth the trouble of upgrading. (I'm currently using an external Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB.) Anyway, I'm wondering if my Inspiron 1520 is capable of handling a SATA 3Gb drive. I've always been a "desktop" person and have built computers for years, so I'm rather surprised to find that my otherwise "souped up" 1520 is running a SATA 1.5Gb hard drive. So, can anyone answer my question: is my Inspiron 1520 capable of running one of these larger drives at SATA 3Gb? I'm not really interested in simply knocking the 3Gb drives down to 1.5Gb.... I'm running the latest BIOS A09 and all latest updates.
Thanks and Regards!
husky0894
1.6K Posts
1
January 23rd, 2009 09:00
There's no difference in performance between a SATA 1.5 and 3.0 drive running in single-drive mode. The limiting factor is the spin speed, not the interface - no 7200 rpm drive can sustain more than 70 MBps, which is well under half what SATA 1.5 can deliver to the interface.
That said, SATA 3G drives will work in SATA 1.5 systems (and at the same speed they would in a SATA 3G system).
knightwolf20024
9 Posts
0
January 23rd, 2009 09:00
according to google my toshiba 120 mk1246GSX is sata 3.0 you should be fine. with a larger drive.