Ultra ATA/IDE laptop hard drive recommendations?

Hi, I have an older laptop (Acer aspire 3003wlmi) that I use as a spare/for testing/for guests to use and its hard drive just failed after 6 years of heavy use.

It uses ultra ata/100 drives which I believe is just another name for PATA/IDE (correct me if I am wrong) and I am looking to replace it.

I know its mostly sata drives these days but can anyone recommend a replacement drive? I took a look on amazon and found this one Samsung HM160HC 160GB 5400prm PATA: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics

Does this look like an ok replacement drive?

For what this laptop will be used for 160gb is more than enough space.

Another thing I wanted to ask about is will it work well with XP? as I remember reading a while back about new hard drives not working well with XP, something to do with the 4K sector format giving slow performance in XP (again, its been awhile since I have been upto date in the computing scene).

Any advice is appreciated,

Thanks.

 

Yes the drive should work fine. There's a long thread here about that specific drive. I have this particular drive in my ThinkPad X22 which is about 10 years old.

Review of the Samsung HM160HC, World's Fastest ATA/IDE Mobile hard drive

The only problem might be the computer won't recognize the whole 160GB. Some older computers had a 128GB limit. No worries on the 4K sector. Only the newest SATA drives have it.

 

160GB HM160HC*, 250GB WD250BEVE or WD320BEVE* are the best 2.5" IDE drives available. * have the higher 160GB-per-platter density.

You may also want to consider a 2.5" SATA HDD using an optical bay caddy. Performance will be better but there is a 0.8W overhead doing the sata-to-pata translation. See the optical bay caddy link in my sig if interested.

 

I have the HM160HC in my D600, and I have had no complaints. World of difference with the old 40 GB 4200 rpm Hitachi drive I threw away. Old Dells have a 48 bit LBA issue, where you have to get 137 GB or smaller, or partition the drive.

 

Thanks, looks like I will go with this drive.

Also it looks like the aspire 3000 is not 48bit lba capable, will I have issues if I partition the drive into a 120gb and 40gb partition before I install the os via restore discs?

 

Are you sure? My Travelmate 2412 from 2005 showed no 48 bit support in tools like hdtune or crystalldiskinfo with the old drive but with the hm160hc it suddenly supported 48 bit.

 

Quick googling revealed that 48bit LBA support was added to the standard in 2003 and that Acer is from 2006-ish. It should work without issues

 

Thanks for your advice guys. I just ordered the Samsung HM160HC and will let you know how I get on when it arrives (If you are interested in knowing that is).

 

Update: The Samsung hard drive arrived today and it works, installed windows xp installed using acer recovery discs. Although I can only see 128GB of the total drive, disc management cannot see any unallocated space.

I booted using a regular XP disc and the hard drive formatting and partitions options did not see any unallocated space either so I think it might be a BIOS/chip-set limitation (it has one of those crappy SIS integrated things). But I don't really mind since this computer will probably never get more than 40% full as it is only a spare/guest machine now.

I must say that it feels much faster than the original 60GB 4200RPM Seagate that was in there. And this drive is much quieter too, I can barely hear it. The Seagate one was very loud haha.

Just installing various software and updates on it now via teamveiwer from my main PC (lazy or what).

Thanks again.