Getting a Replacement Hard Drive...

After 9 great months with my lovely little Inspiron 1520, it seems my little hard drive has acquired terminal cancer (bad sectors). Today when I was installing the last patch to reinstall WoW, I discovered bad sectors!

I immediately rebooted and ran Chkdsk to attempt a fix, and things looked good when it discovered and repaired several bad sectors, but then I delete and re-download the patch files... and it happens again

Ran Chkdsk again, found and fixed new bad sectors, but the error persists and now even Vista seems to have caught on that something is wrong and is now telling me to backup my data immediately.

So... guess it's time to go hard drive shopping!

My current hard drive is a 7200rpm 160gig.

After checking the Dell store and getting disappointed at the prices, I managed to find a 5400rpm 250gig for $130 USD (after shipping) on ebay. I decided to get the larger one because more space is always nice but mainly cause of the price, and the few 7200rpm hard drives I did find weren't very good deals by comparison.

I haven't made the purchase yet, and would like some advice/opinions on a few things. What is the real difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm? What about capacity? I found my current 160gig was big enough for now (I have to delete things to make space every now and then, but nothing I'll ever miss yet), but as games and media files get bigger as technology advances, is space going to get tighter in the near future? And most importantly, where can I find good deals?

 

ehh, isn't it covered by warranty? call dell and ask for replacement. You might even request an upgrade, and they might allow it for a fee.

 

I opted out of the warranties that costed extra so I have a 1 year plan that apparently only covers tech support, and I'm well past the 30 days thing.

The "upgrade" option just leads you to the online dell store which I already looked at during my shopping.

 

ah, ok. I had good luck with BB sales on external 2.5" drives. They frequently sell those cheaper than retail internal drives.

 

What kind of speed loss do you get on external if you use firewire?

 

go to newegg

 

You may still be able to get the drive replaced for free. Remove it and find out the manufacture and then contact them or use their form if available on their site to see if the HDD is covered yet.

Newegg is a good place to shop for HDDs btw.

 

I don't use them externally, I swapped out drive I got from Dell to the one I got with external one. If you are careful enough, and don't tear up the stickers, you'll still have the warranty. Easier to get a retail one from newegg, but it's more expensive, too

 

Should I be able to use any 2.5" SATA notebook hard drive as long as I keep the mounts and such from the old one?

Some sources sell adapters but others seem to imply they are not necessary as long you keep the mounts from the existing hard drive.

 

If you are keen on a 7200 rpm drive, I recently bought a 200GB 7200 RPM drive for 129 shipped from Dell Small Business. Its actually a seagate momentus 7200.2.

 

Found one for 129 there as well (tricky bastards, didn't show up under inspiron hard drives, but the description says it works in inspirons), but it was 156 after shipping! Did you use a coupon code or something or was it just a deal that's over already?

Otherwise I found 250gigs 5400rpm on newegg for $110 w/free shipping, which I might go with just for the extra 50 gigs even if I get the price down on the 7200rpm.

P.S. Will check for manufacturers warranty tomorrow when I can get my hands on the right sized screwdriver to take the cover off and get to my hard drive label. Didn't think it would apply when buying through Dell...

 

What is the manufacturer of you bad sector hard drive?
And I didn't find the answer to his question in the first post. Is it worth buying a 7200 hard drive? Is the difference noticeable?
I currently have la 7200 RPM 120GB Fujitsu hard drive on my Inspiron 1520 and after testing it with HD Tune it only came with 52 Mb/s as a maximum speed. I saw Seagate and WD 5400 drives which are faster than this (55 Mb/s WD, 53 Mb/s Seagate). Am I not looking in the right place when comparing these drives? Or is my Fujitsu hard drive that slow that many 5400 RPM drives are just as fast?

 

I would like it if someone here who's tried different hard drives in the same machine could answer this, please?

The manufacturer is Seagate, and soon I should find out for sure if the manufacturers warranty will allow me to get a replacement, but even if I get it replaced under warranty (only problem I see with that is it would take longer to deal with shipping, I'd probably be getting a refurb, and I wouldn't have both drives on hand at the same time so it'd be harder to back stuff up) it's still good to know about hard drive purchasing.

 

just to add to this similar topic... I recently received a 7200 RPM HDD and wanted to use this in my laptop.. After opening the HDD 'bays' I noticed that my original HDD is encapsulated in a metal cover, that I just could not figure out how to remove.. This cover was required as it was the piece that actually connected into the HDD 'plug'.

Can I get these casings from Dell (couldn't find it on their website).. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Can you get them from other shops and are they standard across all laptops?

I have a Vostro 1700 laptop.

 

Wasn't any special deal or anything. It was just listed as list price.

 

Go for the 250GB or 320GB 5400rpm, because either of those with be of a similar speed to your current, bad hard drive, and provide more storage and a better battery life, not sacrificing performance either.

 

Necromas,

Hi, I'm with the Outreach Team at Dell, I saw your post and wondered if you would like some assistance. Because if your computer is less than a year old, you can get the hard drive replaced by us for free, it's still covered by the warranty you paid for. I can assist you with this if you want. You can contact me through a Private Message on the Dell Community Forum, or by sending me an email at [email protected], be sure you put Attn: Dell-Robert_P so it will get routed to me. Thanks