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Can i use an EIDE laptop hard drive in a dell inspiron 1525
Hi, My sister has a dell inspiron 1525 laptop and the hard drive has gone bad. I have an old inspiron b120 that has a good hard drive. The b120 specs say it's a EIDE drive. The 1525 hardware upgrades page has a lot of SATA, but also some IDE internal drives. My sister only uses the laptop for browsing and email so she's not a power user. Question: Could I use the b120 drive in the 1525 or should I buy a new SATA drive?
David
You won't be able to find a bridge converter (electronics that converts EIDE to SATA) small enough to allow the HDD to fit inside. Sorry, get an EIDE drive on ebay, or even an old broken laptop that has a good HDD. You can probably find one for well under $50.
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Leew said what I should have reinforced. You can buy a whole used broken laptop with an HDD, whether SATA or EIDE for $50. So don't get hung up on the price of a replacement disk.
Statistically you are better off with one that is a few months to a few years old then a brand new HDD. That is because the older disks survived the higher-risk infant mortality range.
Never lose site that 100% of disk drives fail ... eventually. It doesn't matter if new or old. Your sample size is one. So your HDD can die at any time, no matter if you buy a used HDD from a guy selling out of the trunk of his car, or a $900 top of the line SSD.
Tell your sister to invest in some online backup software, and also get a USB->EIDE external enclosure, so she can use that other disk for an external backup, and let her keep the backup at your place, to protect against fire or flood.
Statistically you are better off with one that is a few months to a few years old then a brand new HDD. That is because the older disks survived the higher-risk infant mortality range.
Never lose site that 100% of disk drives fail ... eventually. It doesn't matter if new or old. Your sample size is one. So your HDD can die at any time, no matter if you buy a used HDD from a guy selling out of the trunk of his car, or a $900 top of the line SSD.
Tell your sister to invest in some online backup software, and also get a USB->EIDE external enclosure, so she can use that other disk for an external backup, and let her keep the backup at your place, to protect against fire or flood.
ASKER
I already bought her a USB drive and I'll show her how to do backups after I install Windows 7 again. Thanks both of you for your help.
Joe
Joe