Good selection of laptop drives?

Thu Feb 20 12:39:28 PST 2003

Pardon the potential duplicate, I sent this message earlier from an
email address that's not subscribed to the list.

On Thursday 20 February 2003 11:30 am, David Alban wrote:
> Can someone recommend any stores which are likely to have a good
> selection of new 5400 rpm laptop drives?  Fry's in Palo Alto didn't.

I only buy disk drives "boxed for retail" at Fry's.  Their bare
drives could have been bought on the gray market.  I hear that, when
an OEM rejects a pallet full of disk drives because of low quality,
the whole pallet often ends up on the gray market.  [About four
years ago I bought three very-cheap SCSI drives from Fry's, and two
of them failed within a month of use.]

The same situation holds for DRAM.  A pair of no-brand SIMMs from
Fry's both developed errors (and they didn't have parity/ECC, so
they really scrambled the Windows registry).

So, I would only buy bare drives from Fry's if they went into a RAID
array.  And I would only buy bare DIMMs from Fry's if they had
parity bits e.g. 168-pin DIMMs, x72 (and the motherboard implements
ECC).

> P.S.  The drives I found online all seem to require a the better part
>       of week (or more) to get to me.

That's surprising to me.  I would assume you could find stock
somewhere, and then get next day delivery.

By the way, after checking out a few laptops, it looks like you can
put thinner disks into laptops designed for thicker disks.  I.e. the
mounting holes for various thicknesses of laptop disks seem to be in
line with the connector (and in the same position), so that thinner
disks always work.

So, don't bother to order the same thickness disk that came with the
laptop (which may be old enough to have limited stock).  Buy a
newer/thinner/bigger/more-available disk.  You would want the power
consumption to be the same or less, but thinner/newer seems to
always mean lower power.

-scott

p.s. The opinions in this message are my own, not those of my
employer.