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July 17th, 2006 00:00
question re: upgrading hard drive
I have an inspiron 8600 with an 80 gig hard drive (although it only shows 70.9, though I guess I understand why).
It's full (of mostly music), and I was wondering whether it would make sense to upgrade by buying a notebook hard drive. My understanding is that 160 Gb (e.g., seagate 5400 speed) is as big as they come right now?
Would there be any compatibility or reliability issues?
Would this be a simple install (if I had an external hard drive to transfer my files)?
Anything else I should be aware of?
Any advice/recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
rob
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ejn63
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July 17th, 2006 00:00
You should consider making backups of your data if you do not now have them - there are two types of hard drives: those that have failed and those that will fail.
robfasman
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July 18th, 2006 00:00
thanks.
i was going to get the seagate 160gb drive and a 160gb external (for backup), but it's an ATA interface. Would that not work? I don't really understand the difference.
In my research the only other 160gb drive is a hitachi, which is also a SATA interface.
So that interface won't work with my Dell???
any ideas would be appreciated. thanks,
rob
robfasman
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July 19th, 2006 06:00
so it looks like the largest capacity internal notebook hard drive is the western digital scorpio 120 gb, which i could only find on the dell website.
is EIDE an outdated interface type? it seems like the vast majority of hard drives are SATA? is there any way to convert/adapt ATA to EIDE?
Does this mean that 120 gb is as large as i can expect to upgrade the drive on my 1.5 yr old inspiron 8600?
GilesKennedy
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July 19th, 2006 09:00
Newer PCs (esp. desktops) have SATA these days (Serial ATA); older ones like yours and mine have (parallel) ATA aka IDE/EIDE (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_IDE). You don't need to convert anything: just make sure you get an ATA/IDE/EIDE drive. In a laptop there's probably not space to install a SATA to ATA adaptor.
This page http://www.seagate.com/products/details/0,,6,00.html suggests that a 160GB Seagate drive should be available ... perhaps it's not out yet. I've not seen it in the UK, but if you are desparate for storage space you may want to wait a bit or contact Seagate to find out when it will be available. Or use a big external drive (USB or networked).
Edit: the 160GB drive is availalbe in the UK here:
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3YYS&CategorySelectedId=11154&NavigationKey=11154,41580000,40970000
Message Edited by GilesKennedy on 07-19-200612:32 PM
robfasman
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July 20th, 2006 01:00
thanks very much, Giles.
I assumed that ATA was the same as SATA and that EIDE was something entirely different.
Newegg has the seagate (ATA) for $209:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148073&ATT=22-148-073&CMP=OTC-pr1c3grabb3r
i think i'll give it a go, and get a reasonably cheap 160 gig external to use as back up.
cheers,
rob