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Cost of Dell replacement hard drive?
I have a Dell XPS Gen 2 with (2) 250GB SATA hard drives, not even 2 years old. After spending 8 hrs with tech support, reformatting the hard drive and reloading OS, they've determined that the main hard drive is slowly failing and say that I must replace it. I will refrain from ranting about this here - but I've never had a HD fail so quickly, esp on a computer that was not used heavily. The only replacement HD offered by Dell is $290. A quick check on newegg and elsewhere shows I can find a replacement HD for under $100. Dell cautioned me that they won't help me if I buy a HD from someplace else - but how can they justify a $200 markup? Am I missing something here? Is the Western Digital XL80 used by Dell in this system so much superior to the other WD and Maxtor models out there?
ejn63
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February 22nd, 2006 21:00
Dev Mgr
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February 23rd, 2006 15:00
SATA (1) or SATA2 doesn't matter for your system. They are compatible with eachother. I think the XPS Gen2 used the Intel 875 chipset, and therefor uses the ICH5-R controller (see the chipset diagram from here), which doesn't support NCQ, so don't get talked into NCQ with performance promises as your system wouldn't be able to use it anyway. So if the drive you're buying is SATA2 with NCQ, that's fine, but if a SATA1 drive w/o NCQ is significantly cheaper, you could consider that option.
angelah100
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February 23rd, 2006 17:00
You have been really helpful. Could you tell me the difference between these two interfaces: SATA 3.0Gb/s and Serial ATA150 ? Thanks
Angela
ejn63
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February 24th, 2006 00:00
Practically, the limit is the spin speed, not the interface. That is, there's no practical difference between SATA 300 and SATA 150.
royhud
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March 14th, 2006 16:00
angelah100
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March 14th, 2006 20:00