laptop hard drive

davyrocket2

hello I would like to ask if anyone has a opinion as regarding the life of hard drives .I bought a brand new western digital blue back in 2015.I have my own windows 7 64 bit licensed disc that i bought its not a copy and has the number I managed to get it authorised and it seemed fine now just recently I bought a webcam .i downloaded skype and got it working approx  two days later the hard drive is dead so I am asking for reccomendations of ones to purchase

adam-burnley

Drives do last longer, but many fail within 5 years.  My engineers replace quite a few every month.

I'd recommend fitting an SSD to improve speed.

EndlessWaves

Drives can fail suddenly at any age, it's just the nature of the beast.

Unless you need a high capacity drive (2TB ) then you want to replace it with an SSD these days rather than a traditional hard drive. Crucial's MX500 is a good choice.

davyrocket2

my laptop is a dell Latitude D830,i am running 4Gb ram and was advised that s 1TB hard drive was the largest it would run I bought it from ebay brand new and did not want to get another of the same and have that fail ,question I see different speeds quoted and if I purchase a SSD do I need a adaptor to make it fit.I am aware my Dell is fairly old but I managed to make it work ok after flashing the bios to the latest version.I am slightly puzzled that a Dell latitude D630 can run 8GB ram but a D830 can only run 4GB surely it would be the other way around ? .

davyrocket2

I forgot to mention that I purchased a 1TB drive because at the time it seemed the best value for money,   and I have lots of old style photos I wanted to convert to digital , so the best bang for my bucks was a new hard drive ,  but I do not want to repeat  that mistake if it can be avoided .

davyrocket2

Hello Adam I was told the largest drive that it can handle is a 1TB ,its a Dell Latitude D830

adam-burnley

4GB RAM is the maximum this model supports.  Not sure about storage maximum, but the Crucial site indicates a 2TB SSD would work.  They also list a 960GB SSD as well -

RAM & SSD Upgrades | Dell Latitude D830 | Crucial UK

EndlessWaves

Another drive of the same model is no more likely to fail than another of a different model.

As long as you get a 2.5" form factor SSD then it's the same size as a hard drive. You may need an adaptor for thickness depending on how your laptop mount works, but the same goes for some hard drives.

Memory amount support can be tricky as manufacturers tend to err on the side of caution and not list unreleased capacities a laptop should support.

Although that's a twelve year old laptop so you may want to think about how much useful life it has left before spending more money on it. Windows 7 will stop getting security patches at the start of next year and while your Windows 7 licence is also valid for Windows 10 there's no guarantee such an old laptop supports it.

davyrocket2

I was told it would run windows 10,But I started off on  ,Windows XP and went onto ,Windows Vista 64 bit,which is what I am using now,   whilst making a decision on how to get things up and working again .  I can see were you are coming from about it being a 12 year old laptop but for now its working,as for Windows 10 a nice idea but another operating system to learn

techquest

W10 really is easy to get used to using and as far as I can see your old lappy will support both 32 and 64 bit versions.