Weary laptop drive... recommendations?

Hi chaps,

I'm pretty sure my laptop's hard drive is on the way out (perhaps unsurprisingly for a 4 year old) - I am increasingly finding the hard drive LED fixed permanently on causing windows lockups, slow boot times, and so forth. Formatting with a new copy of windows makes no improvement.

So I am on the hunt for a new drive, preferably to the tune of 250GB/7200RPM. I did previously try a Western Digital drive to these specs, but it produced a continuous clicking noise which I nor favoured or trusted, so was returned before long.

I am very out of touch with computer hardware these days - can anyone recommend a good bet?

Many thanks

I have just removed an old 70GB Hitachi and replaced it with a new 320GB version.

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item...

There are plenty of variants on speed, size, cache &c. It is very quiet - quieter than the predecessor and lower power.

Misco prices are good, add in £3.50 delivery and it will be with you in a couple of days too.

Personally, I like Seagate drives and I have used a site called DriveMyLaptop for drives a number of times in the past, with excellent service..

Samsung spinpoint drives are hard to beat

My old laptop has got a new lease of life since installing a ssd.

Although decent sized SSDs are very expensive. I compromised with a "hybrid" drive that is a regular 500GB drive coupled with 4GB of flash memory. Often used files are automatically cached and after a short period of use the difference is remarkable. The first startup of my laptop after installing it took over a minute, now it takes less than 30 seconds. Starting programs now seems to take no time at all.

Edited by deleted (Mon 03-Jan-11 15:41:48)