Would upgrading my laptop's hard drive be worth it?

If you can afford it, I’d recommend going for the brand new laptop. If your laptop is 4 years old, it’s gonna start giving problems any day now.

And stay off Windows 7. Sure, it’s not as bad as Vista (big accomplishment), but XP is oh so (relatively) nice and stable.

It’ll increase your laptop’s response time if you get a hardrive with higher speeds, but I would rather save money for a new one.

If you’re buying a new laptop, it would be for other reasons—faster CPU, new operating system, nicer screen, etc. If all you want is your laptop with more space, you can easily grab a 500GB SATA drive for under $100.

For $100 you can buy an external 500 MB hard drive with no external power supply needed—runs right off the USB data cable. Then save your money for when you really want to replace the laptop… and you can keep the external drive.

@CyanoticWasp I actually do have a 320GB external and use it to backup/store all my photos and music. But, on my laptop I have no music and barely any photos and i STILL have practically no room for much else.

If money is a real issue, the two most meaningful things you can do to upgrade a laptop are a bigger hard drive and more RAM. Check out Crucial.com for the memory, and newegg.com for the hard drive. For an extra $20 I bought a usb external drive converter with my new drive, and used a utility to automatically upsize all the partitions but stll keep my drive image, so it was a transparent turnover.

Buy an external drive – for the money you’re willing to spend, a 500GB 2.5” internal drive is a bit of a stretch.

Keeping your data on a drive that doesn’t get lugged about much is probably safer anyway.

Yes – Hitachi 500GB Travelstar SATA 7200 RPM Laptop Internal Hard Drive (on Amazon with free SuperSaver shipping)—$89.99+tax

—

I just made this purchase myself.

Note when searching for prices: That laptop’s hard drive looks like it is Not SATA but the older notebook IDE standard (also sometimes called ATA)

@bob_ What experience have you had with Windows 7? It hasn’t given me a problem, ever. Best OS I’ve used so far.

@XOIIO Considering the laptop shipped with only 512MB of RAM I’m willing to bet the CPU isn’t all that speedy, probably a Pentium 4 era CPU, or at best a Pentium M given the age. Even if Windows 7 is faster/leaner than Vista, it’s still a lot more of a CPU load than Windows XP. The comment about XP being more solid than Windows Vista or 7 is a joke; the discovery of Windows XP vulnerabilities hasn’t slowed since release and they’re, as always, discovered at a much higher rate than they’re fixed. The newer kernel has its share of problems, but vulnerabilities actually appear to be tapering off and is a much more secure and solid system than the XP kernel.

Be aware that a harddrive with higher rpm will hurt your battery life.

Here is some perspective.

Six years ago, my buddy (actually, his parents) spent >$2000 on a 3.4 GHz P4 with a top-notch graphics card and 2GB of RAM.
Two years ago, I bought it off of him for $50 with no drives.
A month ago, I spent $500 for a laptop with a CPU twice as powerful as that old P4, 3GB of RAM, decent but not stellar graphics that are comparable to that old tower, and a 320GB hard drive.

I’d say that it’s time to let the old dog go.

@noyesa Ah…

@Silence04 Ooo, good point. It’s only got about 2:30 hr life right now.

@davidgro, good catch. The Inspiron B130 does indeed require an ATA drive.

And apparently, based on price vs. size, they’re quite expensive, too.

—

So, I take it back. Upgrading the internal drive doesn’t really seem like a great idea.

@robmandu At Newegg.com, they’re not too bad.

I would not upgrade a hard drive unless you’re going to do the work yourself and you shop very carefully online. The cost of parts and labor would probably be about half the cost of a new basic laptop. A lot depends on whether your current computer has a lot of features you want to retain and your very happy with the screen.