Replacing hard drive in Dell Vostro 3550

My 500GB Toshiba MK5061GS hard drive in my vostro 3550 has 2 reallocated sectors. It was struggling to get past the windows welcome screen the other day so I rebooted. On booting, windows wanted to do a chkdsk which I let it do. It changed some files and everything is booting ok now, albeit, the OS needs reinstalling without the dell bloat because it's always been pretty slow. Crystal disk shows a caution about the reallocated sectors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the toshiba is not worth saving because reallocated sectors is a sign of a dying drive? If so, I could buy a WD scorpio black 500GB for £56 or a scorpio blue 500GB for £42. The blue is 5400rpm though. Do you think it'll be too slow? Tbh, I only use the laptop for general browsing, the occassional game and my backup whenever I'm fixing or reinstalling the OS on my PC.

 

So your current drive is definitely not salvageable, and you should definitely replace it. As for which drive: the difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm is really negligible; if you want a performance drive, buy an SSD, or even a hybrid drive.

 

+2 for going SSD drive, they blow the crap out of any normal drive for speed.

 

Yeah I know, I have a samsung 830 128GB SSD in my PC. Thing is, I want capacity for my laptop (500GB) and an affordable SSD doesn't cut it. I'll go for the 5400rpm scorpio blue I think.

Btw guys, it was always very slow booting, wouldn't I be better off installing the OS and trying to avoid most of the dell stuff that installs apart from essentials drivers?