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I have a Dell laptop and I'm looking to upgrade to a bigger hard disk. Please can you explain to me how to identify which types of disk are compatible? I'm totally lost in a sea of variants of ATA/SATA/IDE. I've tried the Dell website and couldn't convince it to try and sell me an overpriced replacement. Here are some specs:

  • Laptop: Dell Inspiron 1300 B130 (service tag C07RC2J)
  • OS: Windows 7 Professional
  • Current disk: Hitachi HTS541060G9AT00 (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16822146042)
  • Device manager shows these IDE ATE/ATAPI controllers:
  • a) ATA Channel 0 (supporting my disk in Ultra DMA Mode 5)
  • b) Intel 82801FB/FBM Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 266F

I know about speeds, cache size etc. but I don't know what interface(s) to look at. I'd also love a 7200rpm if that's possible.

Please advise.

Thanks, David

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1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You need an IDE/ATA hard drive. They are the same thing. If you can find a vendor selling 7200RPM 2.5" IDE hard drives, you shouldn't have a problem with installing it.

You cannot put a SATA drive into that laptop according to the spec sheet.

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Thanks, Mark. Is IDE/ATA a specific interface or do you mean "IDE or ATA"? And there are different ATAs, so for example would ATA-100 be good? I'm keen to get a decent performance as I'm running SQL Server and Visual Studio on it but I don't want to drop the battery life to zero. – David Wimbush Feb 5 '10 at 9:23
Well, technically your drive is ATA-100, but you can't find an ATA-66 drive anymore and they never made ATA-133 for laptops. – MDMarra Feb 5 '10 at 12:05
Brilliant. Thanks, Mark. – David Wimbush Feb 5 '10 at 13:06

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