Hard Drive failure

I have a Dell Dim. 8400. It has the Western Digital XL80SD-2 hard drive. It is failing and right now I have it slaved to another computer. I searched Dell's website for a new one and all they are selling that is compatible is a refurbished one... no way. I have gone to Provantage's web site but there are so many to choose from. Can anyone make a suggestion? The best I can tell the specs are 7200 RPM, IDE, SATA, 2MB, 40GB. I would like a little more storage.
Thanks for all your help!!!!

 

I would strongly suspect that you have a PATA IDE HDD not SATA.

No need to search for another WD of the same model as yours (they are not being produced). Just look on newegg and read the comments about HDD reliability and select one. Current IDE PATA HDD will most likely be 7200rpm and will have larger caches than your WD drive.

Bear in mind that size does matter, in that in order to use a HDD > 127GiB, you must have a 48bit LBA enabled bios and have XP SP1 (min).

I am guessing that you probably have SP2 and that your bios can cope.

I usually buy Seagate but each has their own favourite brand.

Good Luck