laptop without a hard drive

I was given a Thinkpad-R40 -2681 as a gift, but there's a catch. The computer doesn't have a hard drive so I have to purchase one, being this the first laptop I ever own I decided to do my homework and look around for a drive to pick, so far I considered 3 options:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136159

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136114

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152110

while I feel inclined in choosing the bigger hard drive I'd like to have more than one opinion regarding this, especially seen how common SATA drives are now, is there any chance I can find other laptops where these hard drives would be useful? or is it better to just stick to a smaller hard drive and save money considering that most notebook manufacturers are moving to SATA?
Thanks in advance for any input

 

My 1520 came with the Scorpio 250GB and so far its a great drive. It benchmarks close to what the smaller 120Gb 7200rpm drives do due to the larger platter density and perpendicular recording.

One general rule of thumb with hard drives, is that generally the larger it is the faster it is with all other variables being the same. That's the reason I opted for the 250, and I'm not disappointed. It benchmarks roughly twice what my Samsung 60gb in my E1505 did.

 

so bigger is always better?
what i'd like to know is if I should just go ahead and buy a big hard drive for the laptop, or if I should save my money instead because they are IDE and not SATA

 

well you can always get a Hitachi 7k100 series harddrive. It is the fastest harddrive which runs on the ide/ata 6 notebook interface. It is 100gb and it is only $90-95 on newegg.

K-TRON

 

so you are saying this drive can also be installed on a laptop that uses SATA hard drives?

 

IDE and SATA drives are not interchangeable.

 

i don't know how old or new the computer is, but many older computers cannot read HDs larger than 120GB. you should verify any size limitations in your BIOS before buying.

 

How do I do that? sorry I'm kinda new with this

 

I searched around and found this:

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/drive_size_barrier_limitations.htm

Quote:

But then why would manufacturers bother to make a 250GB ATA HDD? Wierd. There aren't any clear articles about this, and HDD limitations are not listed in product specifications.

To enter your BIOS, press the assigned key that shows up on your manufacturer's boot screen when the computer starts up.

 

Your hard drive is an IDE, but will have no limitations on size. Its not THAT old. I wish people would stop scaring posters into worrying about things they needent.

So long as the drive is IDE, it will work. Id say the 160 is plenty, unless you have tons of music and videos to be stored on it.

 

as i said in my post, i did not know how old or new the computer was.

it is perfectly reasonable to notify the user that this is a possibility as most of the computers in the hands of users today do not support large hard drives.

 

this part I knew, what I meant to say was how do I find the size of the hard drive? I only see the specs for the processor and the memory RAM

 

well, if you dont have a hard drive in it, it cant tell you how big it is, right?

 

my bad, what I meant to say was how do I verify the size limitations in the BIOs?

 

so far this is what I have:
Soulburner suggests is always better to get the bigger hard drive
K-Tron suggested the Hitachi 7k100 100 GB series harddrive, but then that one is more expensive than a 160 GB hard drive.
NotebookYoozer and bc135 gave a couple of tips about how much space of the hard drive can be recognized.
Nizzy1115 suggest that it may be possible to have a bigger hard drive as long as the drive is IDE.
This laptop has a 2.0 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, is it worth to buy a big IDE hard drive these days with SATA drives almost everywhere or should I just go with a small hard drive to make ends meet? I wanted to install more than one OS in the laptop (XP, 2 linux distros, and 1 partition to store and share files)

 

any opinions?

 

after examining the laptop I have a question to ask regarding where to install the hard drive



also I understand that you need a caddy sometimes, I'm not quite sure, but is the one on the left a caddy?

thanks in advance for any reply