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138117
November 19th, 2008 20:00
Latitude D600 Harddrive Options
Hi,
I am new to this forum, and I have been searching for a few answers regarding how to proceed with this laptop. I know from a locally conducted diagnostic that the internal HDD for this laptop is bad and needs to be replaced. For whatever I do, I can put Windows XP or 2000 on it next. I'd like to go with XP.
The laptop is a Latitude D600, model PP05L, P/N 7T390 A04.
The dead drive is a Hitachi Travelstar, model HTS548040M9AT00.
The drive is a 5400 RPM 40 GB drive. What I would like to have is 7200 RPM if possible, or howver good a performance I can get. I don't want to spend a bunch of money on it. The old drive says ATA/IDE, and I don't understand that exactly. Does that mean I can use either standard?
For future use, I would like more drive space than that. From some reading so far, this D600 BIOS appears to support up to 120 GB? Can I put a larger drive in there, and it will just call it as a 120 GB drive? I've noticed old drives can cost a lot for their sizes.
What kinds of drives can I use? ATA? IDE? EIDE? PATA? SATA? Thank you very much for this info.
In consideration of performance and size, where I would like at least 80 GB, or more if that's not an issue, I am wondering what exactly my options are. I am also open to an external drive if that is a workable option, and if that does not mean slow. Something internal is the best option for use in travel.
Thanks much for your time! Sincerely, Mark
mgmeyers
2 Posts
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November 20th, 2008 14:00
This was my mother's laptop, and she has passed away, and so I'm not sure how to proceed. Are there any suggestions here?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Mark
alzan
22 Posts
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November 26th, 2008 14:00
Hi Mark,
The D600 series uses ATA/IDE drives up to 120GB in size; you won't see much of a performance increase in 7200 RPM vs 5400 RPM. I think ATA is the standard, IDE simply stands for Integrated Drive Electronics; the terms are incorrectly used interchangeably.
You can get a new 80GB IDE notebook hard drive from the online retailers (Newegg) for around $60.00 plus shipping.
An external drive is an option that will get you more storage but it will use up both of your USB ports (the D600 only has two), unless you have a PCMCIA card that has USB ports on it. You can hook up an external drive with just one USB cord (I prefer a seperate power cord so that I'm not pulling too much juice off the USB port. The D600's USB ports are USB 2.0 speed compliant so you'd get reasonably fast transfers.
You don't say how much RAM your D600 has, if you're going to run XP you would want at least 512MB if not 1024; I believe the D600 is limited to 2048MB. Be sure and check Dell's site for the specifications on compatible RAM for the D600.
Hope that helps.
alzan