Hi

The hard drive on my Dell went out today. Tech support says to either replace it or get a new computer.

Is it worth it to put a new hard drive into an old computer? I think the computer is 4-5 years old. It has a 1.6 GHz chip.

Is it easy or hard to recover any data on the hard drive? I would like to do it myself instead of paying someone a boat load of money.

 

it can be easy or hard to try and recover data... depends what died on the hd...... awhile ago, my old 4 gb hd died.... i bought a new one... one day i found the old one thinking what the heck, might as well hook it up and see if it iworks... all my files were fine and easy read, but the 4gb didnt load windows... i took everything off of it, and reformatted it, repartitiioned it and jumpered it, its now a fully functioning slave

if you wnat a new computer, get one... if you think yours is fine, replace the hd... i recently friend my newer hd... well, since i have a backup drive, i just needed a priamry to run the os, i run 98 se... so i found a computer place that sells used stuff, and picked up a 2 gb maxtor drive for $10... all back on line now.....

 

if i were you, i'd pick up a good harddrive, 60, or 80.. cause you can always transfer it over to a new computer, should this one die.. or, get an external case for it later and use it as a portable drive. if money is tight, then do as jima said, find a cheap used one. just be forwarned, that it will make the computer VERY slow.

 

how does the hd make the computer slow? the rpms my 2 gig spins is about what my old drive used to spin... i havent noticed any speed loss....

processor is what will slow it down... my computer is pretty base though.... my computer is way old... its a 233 mhz PII with 256 mb ram

 

Typical Harddrive speeds are 5400, 7200, and now 10k rpm and up. Basically if the computer is looking for a piece of info, the heads are positioned on the right track and wait for the data to come around. The faster the drive spins, the faster it will get it. This is mostly noticable when you're using a lot of small files scattered all over the drive.
Faster spinning drives speed up things a bit, but don't expect your computer to be a lot faster. It is also more noticable when you're low on memory and the computer does a lot of memory swapping to the drive.

 

ahah jim sorry to bust your balls but your hard drive is the SLOWEST part on your computer by far.

Once flash memory is cheap enough to make into a 10-20gb chip your OS will be on there...that way your computer wil turn on almost instantly. Than you would have a MASSIVE regular hard drive for regualr files

 

yea, jim, but he's running a p4 1.6, so if he went and got a $10 drive.. then it'd be an old P.O.S probably running at <4300rpm. I upgraded through defect on my laptop, went from a 4300rpm drive to a 5400rpm drive, and got a noticeable boost in speed. But yea, as macrunner post states.. slowest piece of the puzzle.

 

Thanks for the help.

I am looking at a new PC with an 80 G hard drive (7200 RPM), P4 3.06 GHz processor, 512 MB of memory, blah, blah, blah. Much more computer than the one with the fried hard drive, and less money than it cost too.

I see that one can get a 250 G hard drive for <$100, but way more room than I need.