What type of hard drive do I need to get?

**snkngshps** · November 18th, 2008

I have a dell Inspiron 1501 laptop and I'm looking to get a bigger hard drive. The drive I have now works fine I would just like to have more space. I always get nervous when buying a new hard drive because with ATA and SATA and RPMs and GB/S I never really know what to get. I would like to get the most space possible.. Newegg has three laptop drives that are 500GB.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...009&name=500GB

Will any of those work? And if not can someone tell me what will be the biggest HD I can put in my machine? Also, something that plays well with Ubuntu obviously (although I haven't heard of many people having hard drive compatibility problems). Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

**razy60** · November 18th, 2008

Cant help much on the max size drive but your laptop should be running a 5400rpm sata drive.
If you go to the Dell site and go to tech support put in your service tag(its on a label on the bottom) that should give you an idea of the specs that you will be looking for. It should be able to handle a 7200rpm drive but will get noisy and quite warm, due to the added load.
Just Google max size hard drive for a 1501, probably will be around 250gig

**Therion** · November 18th, 2008

Originally Posted by snkngshps

Will any of those work?

Any of those listed in the link would work in your Dell.

I'm partial to WD hard drives, personally, but that's just my opinion.

Edit: There's no limit to hard drive capacity you can install. You need a 2.5" SATA hard drive; that's all your Dell (and/or Ubuntu) will care about. 5400RPM will be standard, 7200RPM would be better (read: faster), but will also cost you more money. I love a 7200RPM drive in a laptop (really perks them up!) but if you want/need capacity over speed, those 500 giggers you list should hold you over nicely. They're all nice drives.