HD Recommendation for XPS M1530

Hello,

Have a Dell XPS M1530 which is running great with Windows XP thanks to the pack provided by UDI.

Now that support for XP is ending and am now moving to Win-7. However I would like to keep my current HD as is and am thinking of purchasing another HD with 500GB or 1TB capacity.

What is a recommended HD for this system. Have been looking at NewEgg and Amazon but it seems that EBay has some good deals and was wondering if people had good/bad experience with any makes/models.

Your help is appreciated.

 

Personally I would go with an SSD, as thats what I have in my M1330, and I have numerous external drives for storage. I don't see any reason not to get an SSD as they are pretty cheap, and they will give you an insane amount of performance gain. My M1330 (very similar to M1530) is as fast as can be with an SSD.

If you really want to end up going for an HD, go for a Black WD drive. Like this:
New WD Scorpio Black 500 GB SATA 7200 RPM 16 MB 2 5" Notebook Laptop Hard Drive 033585340711 | eBay

If you have money you are willing to spend, I would HIGHLY recommend the following:
Western Digital Black2 WD1001X06XDTL 1TB HDD 120GB SSD 2 5" Notebook Drive | eBay

It has the best of both worlds considering you only have one drive bay, and thats personally what I would use TBH.

 

I wasn't thinking of spending too much on this unit and hence was looking for a HD instead of SSD. But you did raise a good point (specially since Amazon has this same unit for $219). Reason I am thinking about it is that when the time comes to replace my XPS M1530, I should be able to simply take this SSD drive and move it to the new unit.

 

Another point is - my usage is not gaming. I have 8GB RAM and have plans to have a couple of VMs on this unit. So if VMs are not on SSD but are on SATA and most of my work is on those VMs, then what is the benefit of having a SSD. It would just improve performance of host machine and its programs but that is it though unless I have my VMs on SSD. Any thoughts?

 

I am not a fan of using VMs but it will speed up access to your HD. If im not mistaken, not the entire VM is running from Ram installed. You might end up filling all the memory of your ram, and then windows is obviously going to be allocating what ever is over that limit to page file, which is your hard drive basically. So having a faster HD/SSD in that situation would prove useful. I cant remember the last time I used a VM, but dont they have the amount of RAM to allocate to the Driver, along with the amount of page file? In any case, I see that speeding up the host PC will speed up the VM itself, as I dont see the entire OS loaded into ram as even a possibility.

At some point I had to use VMs, I had 2GB of ram, and that was slow as hell... I then simply partitioned my drive and installed it on the second partition, It was the difference between night and day, especially seeing as the OS was installed on an SSD.

 

I understand your concerns about VM. However that is my requirement. Since I have 8GB RAM, I can allocate 3-4GB to my VM without any issue. But since my VM files are too large to be stored on SSD, I have to store them on SATA drive. And most of my work is done on a VM.

Hence I am leaning towards a 500GB/750GB WD Scorpio Black.

But thanks for your inputs. Really appreciated the discussion.