Help on T42 hard drives

My son has a T42 2379 DWU with a 40 gb hard drive. After 8 months of use he has 7 gb left on the drive. His computer programming software takes a lot of space. Anyway, what's the best 80 gb hard drive out there at a reasonable price? What else does he look for besides 2.5 inches? Where is the best deal online? Thanks.

 

Are you looking to replace the internal drive or get an external one?

 

I am looking to replace the internal drive, if it's not too much of a hassle.

 

I don't think it is a good idea to tell you "This is the best HD out there", because you buy it, it fails in 4 months 28 days 15 hours and 25 minutes (we'll skip seconds because most watches are different in that regard) and then you'll end up blaming the person that recommended you the thing.

Lets put it this way, the drive that your sun's laptop had was working for so long, lets not screw with the life and get the same kind, so we'll know that it at least will work for the same period of time. Just pull it out, take a look, go to newegg.com and get the same kind but BIGGER. That way everybody would be happy and you'll have the "best HD out there" because it'll still be working :O)

PS: I would not be worried about the performance, caz almost everything has the same performance these days, if you can notice 0.003 seconds difference, than do get Hitachi (even though some say they do fail more often, me myself personally have everything IMB/Hitachi), otherwise, it's up to you.

 

You'll get the best performace from the Hitachi 7k60 7200RPM drive, but they are expensive right now cause they are in short supply and they only go upto 60GB. You might want consider buying another smaller drive and throwing it in an external case. That way you get the extra storage without having to re-install Windows. Replacing the hard drive is not that hard. There are videos on IBM's website showing how to do it.

 

When looking at harddrives, you're basically looking for two things: Size and harddrive speed. If you son needs a lot of space for programming you might want to look at models at 80 or 100gb. Usually 80 or 100GB spin at 4200rpm, while some are 5400rpms. I have yet seen any 7200rpm harddrives with the space of 80 or 100gb. 5400rpms should be more than enough performance wise, so I would say that a 100gb or 80gb 5400rpm harddrive would be your best bet.

 

another thing, with the new drive, you can get something like Apricorn's EZ Gig transfer (I bought it from Dell for less than $50 about 1 week ago) and it will re-image your son's old drive onto the new drive, so you won't have to install the windows/drivers/etc.. again.

Also, the advice about getting the same brand HD is a good one. I bought samsung 80G for my R40, pushed it in an it was working fine several times, others I was getting 'OS not found' message, as the drive was not working at start-up. I think there were compatibility issues. So... I'll be getting a Hitachi 60G drive soon.

Good luck.
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