Dell E1705 hard drive upgrade questions

I want to upgrade my E1705 to a 7200 RPM HD which has a interface of SATA 3.0. Can't get any response from Dell that makes any sense Can these drives be used without any problems. Do I have to be concerned about the "free fall " issue? I want the speed more than the capacity.
There are many choices out there once I feel comfortable with this question but jump in if you have any ideas.
Thanks .....Jim

 

They're almost all SATA 3 now. You can't get 3.0 speeds on a mechanical hard drive anyway. It makes no difference whether it's 1.5 or 3.0. Just my own opinion here, they're all about the same in real world usage, whether or not one or the other scores a few points higher or lower in the benchmarks. You can get a drive with an accelerometer if you want. I guess it's a personal preference.

 

Well I ordered the Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEKT. I hope the damn thing at least plugs in to the E1705 port. We'll see what happens next.....I don't expect the full potential of the Sata 3...just an improvement over the Fujitsu MHV2100BH which was the origional HD.

 

as an owner of the e1705's slightly more aggressive brother (the m1710), here's what I have for you.

No rotation-based HDD can touch anywhere near the 150mb / sec limit of SATA I, or the 300mb / sec limit of SATA II. The very fastest, the 500gb, 7200rpm, seagate 7200.4 has an SATA II connector (like your HDD has), and maxes out at about 100mb / sec before it suffers the typical "rotational limitations" (ie: it gets slower as the needle goes more and more towards the center of the platter) inherent in all HDDs (yet non-existent in SSDs). Having a 7200rpm HDD in my laptop (a seagate 7200.3 @ 160gb), the real limitation at this stage is how much space you want. The more space you have, the denser the platters are, the faster your read / writes will be. Bang for the buck would be to get a 320gb @ 7200rpm from either western digital or seagate, however there's no rule that says you can't stick a 500gb version at 7200rpm in there either.

Here goes
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148446 (seagate momentus 7200.4 with 320gb space)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280 (western digital scorpio black at 7200rpm with 320gb space)

or if you really want to get a LOT of space with 7200rpm:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148374 seagate momentus 7200.4 with 500gb space)


search around, i have the 7200.3 at 160gb version of the momentus drives in my m1710 and i've had no problems with it. I can only imagine the 4th gen versions will be even better. The same with WD, no problems with them either in my sister's hp dv2000.

Jason

addenda: the WD 320gb 7200rpm is a direct swap, enjoy!