Replacing Hard Drive

My friend has a Dell 1505 laptop running XP Pro that has a Western Digital Scorpio 1200BEVS installed that went bad so I'm trying to help him find something compatible with it. He says all it says is 5400RPM and ATA hard drive on it besides the model number.

I called Western Digital and the BEVS series has been discontinued but I got a India guy who kept me on the line forever and I don't think he had a clue what I was talking. He finally said all of the Scorpio Blues drives was compatible WD Scorpio Blue

Does it seem reasonable he might be right?

 

That is a SATA drive and can use pretty much any standard laptop hard drive, don't need Western Digital either. Even get a 7200RPM is fine, it will just maybe have a little more vibration which may or may not be noticeable in the laptop, but will be quite a bit faster.

Just visit newegg and the 9.5mm 2.5" drives and take your pick!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ption=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

 

Thanks for the quick reply!

Plenty to choose from but if he buys a WD drive their website mentions their newer drives are optimized for Windows 7 or Vista and mentions something about running WD Align for XP.

Is this really necessary and if so what is the procedure starting from installing the new drive, loading XP etc.?

Maybe it would be easier to choose another brand what do you think?

 

WD enables a "fakie" 4KB sector size, which has a couples pluses - larger sectors, so less data is "spent" storing error correction data, most data clusters default to 4KB (at least from Windows Vista on. OSX and Linux variants have no issues) so paging is more efficient, less chance of losing error correcting data and other factors as well. For the end user, it means that more data can fit on the same size platter (permitting larger available space), and is somewhat less likely to get lost.

What WD Align does is bring the 4K sector into alignment with a cluster of 8 consecutive 512B virtual sectors, by shifting the start of data from LBA63 to LBA64 (this is probably more technical than you wanted). (e.g. instead of having the sectors go 0, 1-8, 11-16; you restarted the count to go 0-7; 8-15; etc). If you're out of alignment, you take some substantial performance hits on random writes.

One old solution was a jumper trick - however, the jumper is more of a hack than an actual solution, and I don't think WD promotes it anymore (edit: they stopped selling jumpered drives to the best of my knowledge). Essentially, the jumper does a +1 between the actual write on the drive and where the OS thinks the data is, so that the OS sees the data on an offset emulated sector that actually lands inside the correct 4k cluster/sector.

So how to align?
Run the WD Align tool. You can tinker with jumpers if they're available (and your drive still has them), but the easiest (and better) way to go on a new drive, whether you clean install or clone an existing drive, is to run WD Align after you install your drive and have the OS installed or the clone copied onto it.

More info here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888

 

I've been somewhat biased towards WD over the years and as woofer00 points out, mis-alignment can have some detrimental performance, but probably nothing your friend would notice considering the drive he's been using. But WDAlign is a good free tool to use but will only work with Western Digital drives.

 

Thanks he just ordered a WD Scorpio Black I'll try to get him to run WD Align after he gets everything installed.