Cheap place to buy an old laptop hard drive?

[parkbench]

Hello there,

My 4 year old laptop's hard drive bit the dust and grinds until a General Protection Fault of sorts takes over... before Win2000 even loads.

I'm so out of the loop with PCs/laptops these days... anyone know where I can pick up a cheap 20+GB drive for this thing?

 

[Zepper]

www.compgeeks.com usually has some but they've been blowing out a lot of stuff lately.

.bh.

 

[Flash1969]

The For Sale/Trade Forum here on Anandtech is the place to go........

 

[parkbench]

not finding anything that seems appropriate in for sale/trade forum, and compgeeks doesn't carry toshiba drives... any other suggestions?

 

[corkyg]

You don't need a Toshiba drive - any 2.5-in drive from 9.9mm to 12mm think will do.

Have you looked on E-Bay?

There are lots of them here - even Toshiba . . .

2.5

 

[Zepper]

Yeah, any notebook drive will do size limit depends on your BIOS and the OS you're using.

.bh.

 

[parkbench]

Will this do for a P3 800mhz satellite?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi...em&category=42183&item=6779430472&rd=1

 

[Zepper]

He's seriously OVERCHARGING on SHIPPING to make up for the ?LOW? purchase price!!! Actual shipping for that by priority mail with insurance would be about $5.50. He's charging $20. w/ required insurance - it's all the way down at the bottom in hopes you'd miss it... I'd shop elsewhere on principle.

Newegg has a Samsung 40G drive for $69.99 shipped and it's a 5400rpm drive while the above is an old 4200rpm unit - Toshiba 40G 5400 is $73.99 shipped at newegg. You may be able to find better deals at other reliable resellers. Use the price search engines.

.bh.

 

[parkbench]

Thx for the heads up Zepper!! Will a 5400rpm drive fit/work inside my Satellite? I'm starting to get the picture that they're all the same as long as theyre 2.5", is this correct?

 

[Zepper]

Yes, they are designed to a notebook standard and are automatically picked up by the bios - just update your BIOS if there is a new one available so it will be able to handle the largest possible.
. I edited my earlier message so please reread.

And I just noticed that the Samsung I mentioned above has an 8MB cache and the Toshiba has 16MB! Most notebook drives still have only 2MB...

.bh.

 

[parkbench]

Last question, does ATA6 or 7 matter?

I pulled out the broken drive and I can't figure out which mine is. The manual doesn't say anything either.

Is the extra cache going to make a difference on this old P3?

 

[Jeff7]

One thing to check before you buy - how thick is your current drive? Try to be as exact as possible - and use millimeters too. Buying a drive that's too thick will cause problems - some law of phyics, mainly the one about two objects simultaneously occupying one place, prohibits it.


I got a nice http://www.directron.com/mp0603h.html from Directron. It runs even cooler than the 4200rpm drive it replaced. It's still no desktop drive, but the faster rotational speed and 8MB buffer really do help.
I think this is the one that Zepper mentioned.

He's seriously OVERCHARGING on SHIPPING to make up for the ?LOW? purchase price!!! Actual shipping for that by priority mail with insurance would be about $5.50. He's charging $20. w/ required insurance - it's all the way down at the bottom in hopes you'd miss it... I'd shop elsewhere on principle.

Wow, that's nuts. $7 for insurance alone?? Let's say that is for Priority Mail - he could insure nearly $600 worth of stuff for that cost. I hate when sellers do that. I've seen some people try to charge $20 to ship a stick of RAM - just ship too, insurance was extra. I charge shipping, maybe a $0.50 - $1.00 for packing materials, and actual insurance rates (optional or required, I decide). I wish they'd just be honest and say "Shipping is this, insurance is this much, and add $5 to offset eBay fees, and $2 just to boost my profit margins."

 

[Zepper]

They do it at least partly to move the total from product to shipping - you don't have to pay "final value fee" to eBay on shipping charges so there is substantial incentive to shift cost into shipping. I see a lot of small items with most of the cost shifted into shipping.

.bh.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Zepper
They do it at least partly to move the total from product to shipping - you don't have to pay "final value fee" to eBay on shipping charges so there is substantial incentive to shift cost into shipping. I see a lot of small items with most of the cost shifted into shipping.

.bh.

Hmmm, I see, good point. Interesting tactic. I remember the good old days of eBay, when it was still possible to snag really good deals, especially on auctions posted at odd times. But the sellers adapted. The market always adapts.