hard drive help
 

My hard drive in my dell just died. I need to go buy a new one. How do i make sure i buy the right one that will work in the dell? Thanks if you can help me.

well Dell has been making computers for some time, without any background information the advice you get could be completely wrong.

let's start with...

• When asking for help... We need as much information as possible to offer our best assistance. We need to know what is wrong with what, and as much general information about your system and anything you may have done to it recently (new hardware, applications, cat spilled coffee on the keyboard, etc...)
  
  OS: What version, have you patched it?
  Processor: Intel, AMD, Mhz, overclocked?
  Motherboard: what type...
  RAM: how much and what type. PC100, PC133, PC2100, PC2700, how many sticks.
  HD: size, type, partitioned
  Media: floppy, Zip, CDROM, CDR, DVD, etc...
  Browser: IE, Mozilla, Opera, what version <-- VERY important for web problems.
  
  <li>If asking for buying advice, please list what you have, what you want to spend, and what types of things you want to do.
  

if you put the service tag(on the side of the computer) on dell's website, it should be able to tell you what type of hard drive to get. there are several types of hard drives.

if you feel like cracking the case, take a look, it will either be IDE or SATA, SATA

here are some pics of the diffrent connectors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integra...ve_Electronics

Laptop or desktop would be another question. Dell model would certainly help.

I've just raided two seagates in my dell - got a cheap raid card and bought another seagate 300gb onto my 160 i bought at the beginning of the year. Easy as pie mate, just have to figure out whether your board supports SATA. It will probably have an IDE cable anyway, so that's always a safe bet.

My dell is an old one, had an IBM deathstar in it that lived for 5 years of almost constant use, which was quite nice. I'm never buying a dell again though, there's a design flaw in my case which means that two drives create too much vibration weight so that you get a lovely and irritating noise >_< I've had to foam up the drives and the supports, seems to have worked.