Laptop hard drive upgrade question

[wazzledoozle]

I want to upgrade my mom's laptop (dell 600m) from the stock 30gb 4200 rpm drive to a new 5400 rpm 120gb drive from newegg.

Does anyone have any experience with this; know if going from 4,200 rpm to 5,400 rpm could not work due to not getting enough power? The stock drive is also ATA-5, and the new one is ATA-6.

I am only looking at replacing the internal drive now that I found the external WD drive I got her can't draw enough power off the USB port to run

 

[Commodus]

Typically, the power draw isn't significantly greater -- as drives have gotten faster, they've usually tried to optimize the power consumption.

As for the external drive, if it's desktop-sized (and occasionally, notebook-sized) it won't be able to draw enough juice over USB regardless of the notebook in question. FireWire sometimes eliminates that problem.

 

[Old Hippie]

Does anyone have any experience with this; know if going from 4,200 rpm to 5,400 rpm could not work due to not getting enough power?

It will be just fine.

I found the external WD drive I got her can't draw enough power off the USB port to run

You'll have that. Usually a Y cable will fix the problem.

Good Luck!