replace dead ATA-3 hdd with new ATA-5 possible?

My brother has an old laptop who's hdd is dead. I need to replace it but it's a really old model and finding parts for it is very hard. The original hdd was ata-3, so i suppose the laptop is ata-3. Can i put an ata-5 hdd in it? Would it run slower or would it not run at all or what?
And if ever, do you know where i can get an old hdd that would suit my needs? Thanks.

It's an Armada 1700, here's the part info for the original hdd:

255292-001
4.0GB ATA-3 IDE hard drive - 4,000 RPM, 2.5-inch form factor - 512KB segmented buffer with write cache, 44K reserved for F/W

 

HDDs are backwards compatible, so it will run at ata-3 ... i guess that's UDMA 33. so it will be a tad slower.

But what you have to worry about is the BIOS not supporting large HDD capacities. So you might install, say a 40GB, but only get to use 8GB (it will recognize it as 8GB).

It's a pentium 1???

 

pentium II
actually they upgraded the hdd to a 12GB one so i suppose it would take at least up to that

you know, if it was up to me, i'd sell it for parts and buy a new old one... but it's not up to me

 

If I am not mistaken that starting with PIIs large HDD support began. So no need to worry about that.
You can use any 2.5", no need to go with anything faster than 4200RPM because you wont get much out of it anyway. The one that is in it now might be thicker than the ones available today (9mm) but that's no problem becuase you can still screw it in because the screw locations are the same.

 

That's cool, thanks for the info.