Hey guys, just a quick, noobish question here. My laptops´ drive just got corrupted, and while I need to get a new one, I´m not entirely sure what I´m looking for. This one is a 150 gb NTFS drive, so do I need another NTFS, or will any other do?
NTFS is a format. There are a couple others (FAT32 is a major one), but most new windows prefer to keep it in NTFS But back on topic, as far as I know any hard drive can be formatted in NTFS. So it depends then on what speeds you expect/security/etc. For a laptop, if you move it around a lot, and you're ok with a moderate price and that size, you can pick up a pretty good solid state drive. They'll be a bit on the pricy side though. I like the solid state because it won't get damaged by bumps/etc. And the read speed is vastly greater. If you are on more of a budget, just get any regular HDD, probably 320 GB is fine for you. Will cost under $100. But you have to make sure they are 2.5", not 3.5" (laptops use the 2.5" standard, desktops use 3.5" standard). Here's a link with some listed (many other websites sell these though, so shop around). http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=380&name=Laptop-Hard-Drives I fully expect someone to come here and give a better explanation, but that's a good place to start
SSDs have appalling write speeds, and also they have a limited lifespan (and no strange noises/gradual dying like mechanical disks, they just die suddenly) As the above poster stated, it needs to be 2.5", but you need to know whether it has to be SATA or PATA (IDE) as the connectors are very different. With the laptop unplugged and the battery removed, take the hard disk out and look at the connectors. If it has two side by side, one about half the length of the other and both with an L shaped plastic 'key' above the contacts, its SATA. If it has two rows of metal pins (22 on each row) its PATA. You need to replace it with one of the same type. For laptops, 5400RPM is best. It's slower than the 7200RPM used in desktops, but it uses less power and crucially, produces less heat. These two points only apply to mechanical/magnetic disks, SSDs are virtually all SATA and don't have rotating platters
You could just, y'know, try to fix the corrupted HDD instead of buying a new one. It'd be cheaper, and it shouldn't take too long if you know what you're doing.
Thanks for all the answers! Yeah, I'll see if I can't fix the drive myself, nothing to lose, right? In any case, I don't really mind buying a new one, I was just about out of space anyway.
Definitely try reformatting the one you have before buying a replacement. No point in buying something that isn't needed. If you can manage to get to the desktop through a reformat, then run a disk checking utility (one that actually scans for HDD sectors and repairs them as opposed to CHKDSK that scans the sectors and instructs bad sectors to be skipped over).
All disk checking programs instruct bad sectors to be skipped, that's how hard disks are designed to work. hard disk regenerator is the only program that can actually repair bad sectors, and its slow and heavily dependent on what is actually wrong.
