Help with choosing a notebook hard drive

The weekend is near and I'm considering buying a new hard drive for my laptop. My 40 GB hard drive easily gets filled up and I'm considering upgrading to 160 GB. Here's the thing. My notebook uses a PATA hard drive and when I looked at hard drives, there were SATA, SATA II, IDE. WTH?! I'm not familiar with different hard drives so I apologize. I'm considering getting a SATA version but I'm not sure if it will work. Also, how come there's no "PATA"? The ones I usually see are SATA and IDE.

BTW, my laptop is a Uniwill 259EN, more commonly known as the Alienware M5500.

Also, can anyone redirect me to a site that contains instructions with pictures of how to replace a notebook hard drive?

Thanks!

 

IDE=PATA

The disk is sth like socketed..you just pull back to get disconnected and then take it out..

 

Thanks for the help.

So if my hard drive is PATA I can't use SATA?

Are there any other Alienware M5500/Rock Pegasus 650/Uniwill 259EN owners out there that can help me? I'd be so screwed if I bought a hard drive that isn't compatible with my laptop.

 

No,you can't...

 

Ahh crap.

Sorry if I'm asking a lot of questions. But... Is the speed difference between SATA and PATA hard drives big? The IDE hard drives that they have at the store that I'm choosing over are these two: Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (Perpendicular Recording) ST9160821A 160GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache ATA-6 Notebook Hard Drive and TOSHIBA MK1234GAX 120GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache ATA-6 Notebook Hard Drive

What do you guys think?

Thanks again!

 

I would recommend going with Seagate because it has a good warranty tends to stay cooler.

But I'm trying to find a 160 Gb 7200 rpm for my laptop and I just cant find one anywhere. Even off of Tigerdirect and newegg. If you could the location along if you come across one it would be appreciated.