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About replacing my SATA Hard Drive
My backup E Drive stopped working so now it's time to replace it with another one. My System is a Dell Optiplex 990 running Win 7 pro. The drive that quit was a Maxtor 160GB SATA 3.5 1.5gb/s transfer rate. An old one for sure. I want to replace it with a 2TB Western Digital Blue SATA drive as in the pictures. My question is are all SATA connectors the same on the drive and the cables on my system and will this drive connect out of box and work. I hope so as the price is great. Thanks for any insight on this; what may be a mundane question.
vtoy116
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December 22nd, 2017 04:00
There should be no problem replacing the Maxtor with the Western Digital. The power and SATA cables should work. I, personally, would not use a laptop drive because laptop drives are generally slower and therefore use less power and generate less heat. Heat and power are issues for laptops but since you didn't mention any heat issues with your desktop you should be OK.
speedstep
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December 21st, 2017 07:00
Personally I would buy a silverstone adapter and 2.5 inch LAPTOP drive instead. Heat is the number one factor in drive death.
Smaller laptop drives use less power and therefore are not as much of a heater inside your system.
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000LM015/dp/B01LX13P71
https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-3-5-Inch-Converter-SDP08-LITE/dp/B00EHDZLDM
speedstep
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December 22nd, 2017 04:00
" less power and generate less heat. " is precisely why you use them. Its also why Dell started making the R494D and in general using laptop drives. My Current Optiplex 990 desktop uses laptop drive inside an R494D. I have to totally disagree with the "generally slower" statement because the western digital Blue drive is 5400 RPM and the ST2000LM015 is also 5400 RPM. Because the 2.5 inch drive heads have less physical distance to travel and the Density of the data is greater I would say that this drive is the same or faster than a 3.5 inch hard drive.
Here is a Youtube Video of a 960 with that exact setup.