A week ago I acquired a Dell Latitude E6500.  But before I acquired it, I did a Google search for "Dell E6500 reviews" (without the quotes), and all of them were largely favorable.  (There were complaints that the very small blue lights for battery activity etc. were too small and too dim, to which I would agree.)

But one of the largely favorable reviews was from C|Net of Australia, 25 August 2008, at
http://www.cnet.com.au/dell-latitude-e6500-339291554.htm

which accepted comments, some of which claimed that the WesternDigital HardDisks frequently failed.  (To see the comments, scroll way down on the website, past where it looks like the review is ended, and past "Video You Might Like.")

The failure comments are toward the top of the list (note the "years ago" for each), and older comments later --- especially if you click on "View More Discussion," which takes you to comments posted 3 and 4 years ago --- do not mention disk failures (although they mention lots of complaints, some of which misunderstand the E6500's construction).

In particular:
dm  posted a review 2 years ago:  "2 hard drive failures in 11 months"
MikeG   posted a comment 2 years ago:  "Bug ridden, crashes often" (but does not way whether crashes were hard disk failures)
Dmitry  posted a review 3 years ago:  "HDD way to slow."

So I am wondering whether I should replace the WesternDigital HardDisk that came with the E6500 (possibly with a Seagate disk, if I can find one that would fit), or whether my Western Digital disk is new enough (06 June 2009) for me to be comfortable with it.

I do make weekly image backups of my C: and D: partitions, but a lot of data (which would be on partition D:) can accumulate in a week, and much of it is my own "in progress" writing that I can't recover from the internet or correspondents, because it isn't there yet.

I would very much appreciate any comments, or suggestions about whether I need to install a new hard disk.

Thanks.

R.N. (Roger) Folsom

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P.S.  My current E6500 hard disk's specifications (copied from the disk cover) are the following:

DELL LATITUDE E6500 WESTERNDIGITAL HARDDISK SPECIFICATIONS
    www.westerndigital.com

HDD S/N: WD-WXC0A59J9046

TH-0K645G-12552-966-C0C9-A00
    C/0 TH
    DP/N 0K645G
Interface SATA
Capacity 250gb
     RPM 7200
Firmware T0

MDL: WD2500BJKT-75F4T0

WWN:50014EE202E77D21
DATE: 06 JUN 2009    250GB
DCM : HHNTJABB        5VDC : 0.55A
LBA : 488397168        R/N : 701574

SERIAL ATA

U.S. Patents: 6178056, 5956196, 6289484, 6263459
Product of Thailand
Canada ICES-003 Class B/
NMB-003 Classe B        RoHS    

WD Scorpio Black