Hello everyone,

I'm looking to replace the hard drive in my XPS Gen 2. We currently have the original 60 GB 7200 RPM drive and I want at least an 100 GB 7200 RPM drive. I'm having a bit of trouble finding much - I need EIDE, not SATA, right?

I have come across this:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...437&CatId=2680

This would do, but is there anything else available that would be better? 120 GB or more would be nice, and so would having more than 8 MB buffer. It must be stable, too.

I realize the difference between 7200 and 5400 RPM may be marginal but I'm not interested in going even marginally slower than what we have now.

Many thanks.

If you get one of Western Digital's 320GB 5400RPM PATA drives, it should run as fast or faster than a 100GB 7200RPM drive, and those are your fastest options for PATA.

Thanks. How might that drive be faster, though? It was slower RPM and same buffer size.

It has a higher capacity which more often than not means higher platter density = faster. Anyway, you are pretty limited with PATA hard drives. One option is to remove your optical drive and replace it with a secondary hard drive sata caddy. Then you can use sata hard drives. I'm unsure of the speed difference from using a caddied hard drive.

Essentially though, you could just get a 100 GB 7200 RPM PATA HD (wherever you may find this) and keep all your essentials you need to run fast on this. Then just keep your other data on an external hard drive (or secondary caddied hd).

Thank you both. I went with a 160 G 5400 WD drive from NewEgg for $65, and picked up an external enclosure for my existing drive in the process, which will convert the exisiting drive nicely to a backup for our data (I don't back up the whole drive) and PS3.