When replacing a laptop HDD...

Nitrojan · 7 Mar 2010 at 12:17

The laptop is a DELL Latitude D500 and a friend of mine wants to upgrade to a 60GB HDD. I was wondering whether I would need to recommend him to get an official DELL certified part, or whether a standard 2.5" laptop drive regardless of the brand would be fine?

I know DELL computers are a bitch to work with sometimes and require official parts. Would anyone be able to recommend me a HDD that would work with this model if so?

Thanks.

Deleted member 77746 · 7 Mar 2010 at 12:20

Any 2.5" IDE/SATA hard disk will be fine regardless of the make/model. From reviews the Dell D500 is IDE so you can buy any IDE model.

Nitrojan · 7 Mar 2010 at 21:09

Cheers mate.

malcolm · 8 Mar 2010 at 11:50

Nitrojan said:
The laptop is a DELL Latitude D500 and a friend of mine wants to upgrade to a 60GB HDD. I was wondering whether I would need to recommend him to get an official DELL certified part, or whether a standard 2.5" laptop drive regardless of the brand would be fine?

I know DELL computers are a bitch to work with sometimes and require official parts. Would anyone be able to recommend me a HDD that would work with this model if so?

Thanks.

I swapped the HD in a Dell 600 (similar chassis I think) and it's a doddle. The HD is in a caddy and comes out when you remove two screws from underneath, then you take the drive out of it's caddy with another two. The drive has a small connector attached to it that converts the pins on the drive into a double sided edge connector, just carefully ease it away from the old drive and put it on the new one.

Getting a small drive like a 60GByte can be hard now, but be carefull with installing a larger one. The bios probably has a 137GByte limit, so if you fit another drive you will have to partition it so the boot partition is less than 137.