XPS M1530 Sata or SataII hard drive ?

My XPS M1530 has served me well for over three years, but the hard drive has now crashed. There was a vague warning so I had backed up the complete C: partition and my Photos folder the day before, all I have lost is a bit of music.

The system would not start, and startup repair ran a few times before declaring the Root Cause as being "the system volume on disk is corrupt". in the last few days there had been increasing "application not responding" lockups, and it seemed to be running even hotter than usual.

My question is should I buy a new SATA drive or a SATAII drive, I do not know the difference

The Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB SATAII 16MB Cache 2.5 inch HD seems a good one if SATAII is allowed...

Also should I just bin the old drive, or is it worth trying to access the C: D: and E: partitions?

I have decided this is a good excuse to buy a new Studio XPS 15 as my main system

 

You can buy any 2.5", 9.5mm SATA hard drive. Doesn't matter if it's SATA 1, 2, or 3. Most drives on the market at the moment are likely to be SATA 2. The 320GB WD you've referred to will work.

As for the old drive, in general it's good practice to try to wipe such a thing before you bin it, but if you don't have any sensitive information... well, it's your call.

 

Thanks for the good advice Commander. I have decided that installing a new drive will be an academic exercise anyway as I want a new laptop!

As for wiping the old drive, how can I do that if my computer is unable to access it? perhaps I should physically destroy it.

 

Take a drill and a large bit and drill multiple holes through the entire hard drive casing. That should do the trick.