Good selection of laptop drives?

Thu Feb 20 12:48:49 PST 2003

You have to be careful though that you check that your laptop will handle
the larger drive.  If not, buy a bios overlay.  There are only two
companies that I found that handle them.  I have a one that I will sell
with warranty.

Alan

Scott Weikart wrote:

> 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.