My 30 gig hard drive just died on my dell inspiron 5100. I can get a new 40 gig from dell for $80, but is it worth it to get an aftermarket one...maybe cheaper or bigger?

I just want it to work, no fiddling around with configurations and such. Do I need some kind of adapter to make an aftermarket HD work or is it plug and play?

 

I have the same laptop. you can use any laptop harddrive (2.5").. when you pull your old one out, theres an adapter already there (which is standard with every laptop). Just pull that one off, put it on the new drive and plug it in. Best price is your best bet.

*edit* oops, i meant 2.5" drive.. (i'm canadian. i work with centimeters.)

 

Do you mean a 2.5" drive?

 

I wouldn't get anything from dell, but that's just me. Go to www.pricewatch.com and look up hard drives - go from there.

 

I would get one of these hard drives:

NewEgg Hard Drives

Upgrading to a 7200 RPM hard drive in a laptop makes all the difference in the world. I've been running the first one in my Dell Inspiron 8200 for over 2 years with zero problems. It'll fit in yours too.

 

I have a 40gig Hitachi Hard drive, no complaints at all, the faster rpms did make a difference. I replaced it last year because my stock 20gig IBM was crapping out on me. I hated the IBM one.. it was so loud! Oh, I have a Compaq presario 1700 (4 years old! 800Mhz cpu but it might be time to upgrade)

 

So it's safe to say all HD's are proprietary?
I am going to be upgrading a
Compaq M2010US soon for my g/f, and I may be buying a mini notebook like the size of the Toshiba Libretto for cheap, and will be upgrading that as well. I shouldn't have problems upgrading either one with this HD from the link Churnd posted.

 

Just double check and make sure your laptop uses 3.5" drives to make sure. But I've yet to see one in the past few years that doesn't.

One thing you need to watch out for, though, is how much you're actually going to be toting this thing around and using it while you're moving. 7200 rpm drives don't like much movement while they're being used, and are more likely to crap out on you because of this. That's why the most portable laptops come with 5400 rpm drives. However, if you can just make sure you're sitting down with the laptop on a flat surface while you're using it, you shouldn't have any problems with that.

 

Thanks for that Churnd.

I will check the size and all, and I am pretty sure it's a 4,200 RPM. So if it is, I would be better off just going to 5,600.

 

Ok, so there are laptop HD that come in 3.5" form factor and some in 2.5"? I believe mine is a 2.5". Fry's has a toshiba 80 gig 7200 rpm HD on sale for $109, I'm going to try to pick that up today.

 

Save yourself some headaches and make sure it's the right size. Dell's support website can tell you what you need to know, or if you PM me with your service tag number that's on the laptop I could look it up for you.

 

yea, I just made a typo, as far as I have experienced the only thing that comes in laptops is 2.5" and i know for sure the 5100 comes with a 2.5". internal desktop harddrives are 3.5".

 

The other thing to make note about HDD speeds is power consumption. 7200 speed drives eat away at your battery life faster. Also, watch your operating system. If your computer is running an old OS, it may have difficulty with larger drives. This is actually a BIOS problem that can be fixed but your OS is a good indicator. I had a computer running Win 95 and it would only recognize 4 gb. Back then that was huge. My current laptop (2003 Sony Win XP SP2) won't recognize more than 137 gb. I had to flash the BIOS so I could use my big external drives. My recommendation is hang on to your old hard drive and pick up an external case from Ebay. Wipe the data and format it as additional storage. Typically a buggy hard drive is not faulty, just too much crap fragmented. I have not noticed a serious performance increase between drive speeds to warrent the cost. Laptops were not meant for performance, but for portability.

 

very good information for anyone else reading this. i would of mentioned it but the 5100 is a good performer. i guarantee you it will recognized up to 160gb without updating bios or anything else as long as your still running xp.(haven't plugged anything higher then 160 into mine)

 

Thanks everybody. I ended up picking up that hard drive from frys, although I was mistaken, it was a 60 Gig, 5400 rpm drive. I've installed it and XP so I'm working on updating and installing everything else now.

 

Good deal! Glad it worked out for you.

 

FFWIW, all laptop drives are 2.5". well these days... dont know about 10 years ago... lol

they all have the same standardized connector. what differs is how each manufacturer of the laptop connects to it. each have a cradle in which the drive sits in. then the cradle with their proprietary connector connects to the mobo...

i have virtually opened up every inspiron model from dell for the last 6 years (mostly to GHOST them) and i found a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter to then connect the drive to my removable firewire drive.