Inspiron 1545 hard drive?

Hello, just a quick question about laptop in title, I need to change it's faulty hard drive for a friend fortunately she believes in back up so no recovery needed

Is it OK to use any standard SATA 2.5 inch drive or have DELL used some silly proprietary firmware or interface like they have with things in the past?

 

As far as im aware you can use any drive. Only thing you have to watch is where ghost partitions are used to restore to factory default instead of CD. If you replace the disk then you may not be able to restore it.

 

Also be aware that some manufacturers have a piece on the back of the drive where the pins are, that you need to slip off and put on the new drive. With drives being so cheap these days, personally, I would go with the largest drive she can afford. If the machine came with a 60 gig and she said that she was running out of memory due to all of the files, go with something three times. But also, get her to start saving stuff off of the drive that she wants to keep, and stuff like photos have her save it someplace like flickr, or if she has a facebook account, save it there.

 

One Western Digital Scorpio Black is the right decision !! :wave

 

the original drive was 320gig but being a student she's not rich so after having a good look across the net I found a 250gig in her price range as she never uses more than a few tens of gigs and has an external drive so this was a suitable replacement.
Fortunately the machine came with the re-install disks so all was good.

Thank you for your comments