New HDD ??

I can understand being a bit nervous about choosing a hard drive if this is the first time you've gone through this, but honestly, any of the drives on the web page given as a link in my post will work in your machine.  The SATA connectors are the same on all of them, and any drive of about 500 GB or less is almost certainly a 9.5 mm drive.  You probably don't need to worry about the 750 GB size either, but it's important to examine the spec to make certain the drive is 9.5 mm thick if you get one larger than that.

Dell often gets their hard drives from Samsung, but they can also be Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate.  All are reputable vendors, and most of them provide at least three years on the warranty.

I really thinking about the 320 GB WD of the following sizes:

Western Digital 320GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive 8MB 5400RPM 2.5IN Scorpio Blue (Part # a2436199) = $64.99 (DeLL Price)

Western Digital 500GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive 8MB 5400RPM 2.5IN Scorpio Blue (Part# a2387325) = $54.99 (DeLL Price)

Western Digital 250GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive 8MB 5400RPM 2.5IN Scorpio Blue (Part# a2387324) = $45.99 (DeLL Price)

I tried to get prices from NewEgg But apparently DeLL numbers and descriptions don't gibe with NewEgg's product data base.  Do you think these DeLL prices are in line??

Well on Inspiron 6400/E1505, the biggest hdd you can get from Dell is 120GB, no HDD bigger that this is available.

thanks and regards

I beg to differ. I contacted DeLL via Chat support and I was told the following HDDs would fit my Inspiron 6400/E1505:

Western Digital 320GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive 8MB 5400RPM 2.5IN Scorpio Blue = $64.99
Western Digital 500GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive 8MB 5400RPM 2.5IN Scorpio Blue = $54.99
Western Digital 250GB SATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive 8MB 5400RPM 2.5IN Scorpio Blue - $45.99

Now unless you have some different inside knowledge that the DeLL Tech Support doesn't possess, I will have to believe  them as opposed to you.

Thanks for your interest in my posts.

Just a note to anyone with an older Dell model who is thinking of buying a large hard drive - Check to make sure your model can support the size. This often involves searching Google for people who have had insidious problems upgrading. I learned this the hard way for my old Latitude D600  - I put a 250GB unit in it, and all appeared well, until a few weeks later when it would not boot into Windows, but would only boot into the command line interface. After following all the suggestions I could find about restoring the boot sector, etc etc, I stumbled on a fix, which was to put the drive on another PC to run a disk unfragmenting program to get all the data down below the 130 GB point, then repartition it to something less than 130 GB (or was that 160 GB)? There was some disagreement about that, because Dell doesn't seem to specify it in their specifications.  Reason for problem: The D600 wil write data beyond the 130 GB point, but then barfs on the bitmap it just wrote if NTFS happened to write even a single byte above 130GB (160 GB?) limit - Thus part of the BIOS crashes and won't boot to Windows :emotion-6:

Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung, Toshiba, and I've probably left a couple out, all sell hard drives for laptops.  Check out this page:  http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=380&name=Laptop-Hard-Drives Saving your data and reinstalling from scratch is not a bad way to go.  I've done it many times over the last twenty years on various computers.  A clean installation gives you a fresh configuration that isn't littered with the remains of many programs that have been installed and removed over the years, and a clean installation generally runs faster than one that has been around longer than a year or so.  This is usually a straightforward process, but it does require considerable time since you must install the os, drivers, and any applications you wish to continue to use. You don't absolutely have to do it that way, but to transfer your existing system to a new hard drive requires a program to transfer the image (Acronis True Image and Symantec Ghost are examples) plus an external drive shell to mount the new drive.  If you purchase the drive from a store such as Staples, Office Depot, or Best Buy you might even find that the drive includes a CD having a transfer program on it.  Seagate and Western Digital will, I believe, allow you to download from their web pages a trimmed up version of Acronis to use if you have purchased one of their drives.  If you purchase the drive from an on-line store such as Newegg, however, you will usually receive a "bare drive", meaning that you get the drive with nothing else in the package.  It's cheaper that way, though.  The main expense other than the new hard drive will then be just the external drive shell that you will attach to the laptop via the USB ports.  The external drive shell needs to support 2.5" SATA laptop drives.  You can find a sampling of these on Newegg as well.  Just be sure to select one that indicates it supports a 2.5" drive as there are also shells for 3.5" desktop drives:    http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=92&name=External-Enclosures Please don't think that you must purchase from Newegg; I refer to their pages simply because I purchase from them when it's convenient and I remember their web page address.  There are other on-line stores that I'm sure will treat you just as well.