advice on buying a new hard disk for my dell laptop

Hi, I wanna buy a new hard disk for my Dell laptop but I really have no clue at all when it comes to buying laptop hard disks.

Do I just go out and buy any hard disk, or does it have to be a specific one for my dell. And how do I know that it will psycially fit in my dell, it might be to wide or too thick or something like that. I really have no idea any help would be appreciated.

 

Laptop drives are 2.5" in size... and you have to know what interface your old HDD uses: Ultra ATA or Serial ATA. What Dell laptop are you using?

No, you do not have to buy the HDD specifically from dell.com, in fact I would suggest buying from newegg.com or other vendors which sell for cheaper.

 

First of all, we all need to know what type of hard drive is in your system.

Go into device manager and under disk drives, find your hard drive model number, punch that into google to see what type of drive it is (ex. SATA ATA) and so fourth. Post that information here and we'll figure it out.

 

I have the dell Inspiron 2200. I can't go into device manager because my current hard disk has failed. That's why I'm gonna get a new one.

 

Your 2200's hard disk uses ATA-6 interface. So when buying just make sure the interface is only ATA-6 (nothing else), and the size is 2.5" for notebooks. Hope this helps!

 

ah that is awesome, thx so much. I really appreciate it.

 

I totally agree with TehStranger's recommendation to buy from newegg. I have purchased notebook drives from them. The OEM versions are the least expensive and are just the bare drive which is all you need.

 

check out http://www.xpcgear.com

I've had very good dealings with this company, I have to pay rather high sales tax with newegg, so for large orders it ends up not being that good of a deal, zippzoomfly is also a good place to order, though their site could use some major tweakage

 

I put the number on the hard drive in my device manager in a search and came up with this. http://www.hgst.com/portal/site/hgs...i_baseMenuID=22f0deefa8f3967dafa0466460e4f0a0

So it seems for my Dell 9100 its an ATA-6.

So I go to New Egg and see a lot of drives. Should I get the same brand as mine, does it matter? Id like a reliable 100 or 120 G 7200 ATA-6 drive for my Dell 9100.

how do I pick the best?

 

it doesnt matter about the brand really, personally I'm a big fan of western digital, I've never had one fail on me, hitatchi and seagate are good brands as well

 

unfortunately I don't think I can buy from any of those sites because I live in England and I don't think the deliver here.

 

It's IDE 2.5" so the price would be cheap... not as much as 1 year before , when i try to upgrade my 1100.