An 8250i is a Phillips Drive... , during this past Spring I was deciding on whether to get the 8250i or 9100i HP drive. So I went out to my local Compusa and they had both drives on display, so I checked out both drives physically. You could clearly see the drives are physically not the same especially on the back. The build quality of the 8250i just didn't seem the same as the 9100i. Otherwise I would've gotten the 8250i and hacked it if it were the same drive but different bios.