D600 + Samsung 160GB PATA ??

Hi,
I started a thread at dell last week at the dell forums as user mgmeyers in HDD support. I'm new here, so I can't post links.

That seems like a really slow place, since I have already ordered a drive last Friday off Amazon, based upon what I have read on this site:
1 of Samsung Spinpoint M Series HM160HC 160GB PATA-100 5400RPM Laptop/Notebook Hard Drive - OEM

The outstanding question, I suppose, is wondering if this drive is going to work because it exceeds 120 GB. I also read around here of a larger drive being used than what another model's BIOS supported, where it just recognized as much as it could, so that wasn't a problem (there).

It's a Latitude D600. Its a 160 GB PATA drive. I got it for $75 w/o shipping.

At the dell forums, the thread is still there, and its the only post I've put there, but they say now that my email address is not in their database. ???
This site is 1000 times that one for me so far.

 

I cannot seem to find your older username, weird?

We put a security measure so spammers cannot post links. You can bypass this by leaving out the www. part

Im gonna move this to the Latitude forums and change the title for better assistance.

K-tron should know the answer to this. Heres his review of that drive

 

The 160GB HDD will work. If you look on ebay there's plenty of people selling D600s with 160GB drives. Just make sure you've got the latest BIOS and all and it should be plug and play.

 

Flipfire,
Here's the link from the dell forum... (no h-t-t-p)
en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19243302/19374941.aspx#19374941

Today, I wanted to reply, and I may have hit 6 tries in the process of trying. I don't know what you mean by "older user name"? Here? There? I have only had one at either site, but my significant other has trid to sign up today to be able to post a reply on that thread.

Commander Wolf,
The review you provided a link for is the one I read and then bought the drive. I will make sure it's the latest BIOS, and, are you by any chance suggesting it will give me all 160 GB to use? That would pretty awesome.

 

Marketing: Many people notice missing space right when they open the box. They bought a system with a 160GB hard drive, but Windows shows the total drive capacity as 149GB. That's a difference of 11GB right off the bat. The reason for this has to do with how you measure capacity to begin with. We measure bytes using progressively larger sizes, starting with K (kilobytes), M (megabytes), G (gigabytes), each one standing for a multiple of 1000. So 1K = 1,000, 1M = 1,000,000 (1000 * 1000), and 1G = 1,000,000,000 (1000 * 1000 * 1000). These are the units that companies use when they advertise the size of their disks, so your 160GB drive is 160,000,000,000 bytes in these measurements.

 

That's very interesting!

Actually, I'm thinking more along the lines of a BIOS advertised to not recognize more than 120 GB to begin with, such that if I put in a 360 GB internal drive, then it would give me a number (slightly less than) 120 GB.

Such as with a version of Windows less than XP sp 2, I lost some of a 160 GB drive to O/S limitations, which then went up after getting the O/S up to date, or up to a version that could, I believe, count that high to begin with.

 

Oh i think the limitation your talking about is the LBA (logical block addressing)

A 28bit LBA limits the disk size to 128gb

 

Here is a description of the LBA limit.

The basic question is whether the D600 supports the newer addressing. If, as said previously, others have 160GB in the D600 then you should be able to do the same. Dell may mot have advertised it as such because 160GB may not have been available and tested when the D600 was in production.

WD has plenty of info about this potential problem.

John

 

Ok, I got the new drive.

Windows XP sp2 is installing, formatting 152 GB (152,626 MB). So, it looks like a great solution.

Thanks! You all have been great!
- Mark

 

Thanks for the feedback and update. All too often we don't know the outcome.

John