laptop hard drive upgrade

I'm considering replacing my laptop hard drive with something bigger:

I am choosing between:

Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB - WD5000BEKT
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB - WD5000BEVT

My laptop is an Advent 7113 and runs Windows Vista Home Premium.

Are either of these drives compatible?

 

Well, the question is your laptop IDE or SATA in terms of the drives? I wouldn't worry too much about drivers aspect as Vista did a pretty good job of recognizing an array of drives to install Windows on.

I would say either one would do.

 

Laptop is SATA. I was wondering is there was a capacity, power and/or speed limit?

 

Nah the SATA standard is uniform across desktop and laptops both the power and data connector,if its SATA it will work,without reading all the tech specs of your motherboard if there is a size limit the usual maximum size limit is actually 500gb so it won't affect you anyway.

The oldest SATA I standard has transfer speeds of 150mbps and I know without looking at those drives neither of them will be able to max it out so there's no benefit to be gained by using a SATA II drive even if your laptop is SATA II compliant.

So basically the long winded any will do answer :-D

 

How do I find out about SATA compatibility? or are they bacward compatible?

 

Yup backward compatible like AGP,PCI-E ect.

The connections are the same but the SATA II standard has a max transfer speed of 3 GBps,only high performance SSD's or WD raptors ect can achieve transfer speeds over 150MBps making the 3GBps interface speed advertised by SATA 2 drives a bit of a con,they never reach anywhere near this most operate under the 100MBps range in the real world but this isn't advertised.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=16014

 

Thanks, probably go with the Black version.

 

I'd go with Western digital they usually let you RMA them for up to 5 years or 60 months whichever is longest:-D

Scan are the cheapest and offer the best customer support I've found since your in the UK.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500G...ck-25-HDD-SATA-3Gb-s-7200rpm-16MB-Cache-12-ms

 

this was very amusing...LOL

 

Check out this drive and the review link, below, for another option.

Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd
Seagate Momentus 500 GB
MODEL No ST9500420ASG
( note the "g" on the end of the Model #, very important )
Serial No 5VJ740ZT
Cyl 969021
Tracks per Cyl 16
Sectors 63
Size (formatted) 465 Gigs

Bazza

 

Well, would you believe it! The hard drive failed last week but fortunately well within the 5 years. Will see how the RMA process holds up.

Laptop booted up and said "No operating system found". Couldn't get anything off the drive when I placed it in an external caddy. The disks spins but the computer thinks it is a DVD player!

Have replaced the hard drive with another make.

 

I'm interested to know your choice of HDD, and why you chose that model.

Bazza