Hello,
I have an old Acer Aspire 1600 laptop, that had from the factory a Hitachi DK23ea-40 Gb Hard drive (HDD). The recently recently failed on me and I am planning to replace it, but I do not know how to properly select a compatible new HDD from my laptop that a) would be recognized by the processor/motherboard and b) fit correctly within the laptop box.
The Hitachi DK23ea-40 Gb is not produced anymore (and the few remaining ones sold are either refurbished or sold only in US – I am in Europe and it is tough with shipping and customs). The HDD was a 2.5′ (95mm) 4200 RPM ATA-5 (Enhanced IDE) drive – 40 PIN. I have found also its dimensions (0.37″ Height x 2.75″ Width x 3.93″ Depth). The Laptop uses an Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz with 512 Mb memory.
Questions:
a) Are all 2.5′ (or 95mm) hard drives of the same dimensions? If I see these figures, does it mean they will fit my laptop? (I know that I remove some screws etc. from the old HDD to screw on the new one, but will they fit?
b) How can I find if my computer will support a newer ATA (i.e ATA-6) hard drive? Should I even consider SATA HDD, since this is a 4 year old laptop and I am changing the only (primary) HDD? I do not want to buy a HDD and the have my laptop not recognize it. Is it the compatibility issue with my motherboard or my processor?
Any guidance would be very very very much appreciated. I am exploring a whole new world that never had to do until now… 🙂
Thank you for your thoughts in advance, Christos
