Swapping HD disc on laptop question
 

I dropped my laptop and killed the HD the other day. IT refuses to spin, but everything else seems to be functional when i run diagnosis.

I took it apart and want to remove the disc out of it and put it in a new one that'll spin.

do i need to buy a new one that's the exact same disc speed and storage space?

I know it only spins at 5400RPM and would prefer a new larger 7200RPM HD, but I need to get the info off here first.

anyone advice? or should I just deal with the same thing? It's about $40 for an exact replacement.

no, get yourself a nice 7200rpm drive. all you care about is whether new disk is sata or ata. make sure you get same type as your old one (ata or sata)

think it'll even be able to read? at least once to get my data before it fubars?

Are you talking about taking the physical platter out of the drive case and sticking it in the new one? There's high dollar shops that do that, but I've never heard of anybody doing it themselves.

Data recovery is very expensive. The HD on my work laptop failed, and it was $1000 to get the data recovered. But I had to do it because I had many years worth of work stored on it. I started backing up after that.

Plater transfer will be difficult and may not even succeed. If you dropped it and the head hit the platter you can say goodbye to the data.

Makes me want to go hug my X60, has an accelerometer and a piezo gyro that stops the drive and parks the head from excessive vibration or sudden increase in acceleration like during a fall.

G'day
Only you know how much the data on the HDD is worth to you. So you will need to consider the cost of data recovery v the personal data loss. I assume that you can spin up the HDD, otherwise how are you running diagnostics?

I suggest taking the laptop as a whole to a specialist and seeing what they can do for you.

As a IT Disaster Recovery consultant I see loss of data happening to a number of our clients from Mainframe to laptops. I cannot state how important it is to take a regular backup of your data.

Good luck

J

your dell takes a standard laptop hard drive. one screw and the carrier with it pulls out and you can just swap it easy. make sure you have a boot CD.

Then load up windows and get one of these:
http://www.xpcgear.com/25enclosure.html

so you can try to pull the data off it while you have a working computer.

i've taken apart a few hds that won't spin up and i don't think i could get any of them to work again, the discs look cool and are fun to throw:)

how they vibrate in your hand always makes me laugh

Yes...you can change out your HD for something bigger and faster...my laptop is running a 10K RPM harddrive and came with a 5400RPM HD...so it will work! :)

As for data recovery...where I work...we charge $600 per GB of on the drive...Depends on how much you want that data....

WD makes a 500 GB backup drive for $150...for future refrence.

the only data i wanted was my megasquirt related map and logs. everything else was just programs. just going to buy a replacement and deal with it.

I doubt your laptop has a hard drive that spins at 10k rpm.

10k rpm 2.5 inch drives are only scsi/sas and run in blade servers.

Yowsa!

I did *once* take apart a hard drive and swap the platters after a failure of the bearings on the drive motor. This was a 1980's vintage Control Data Corp 160 megabyte drive, 5.25", full height, with about half a dozen platters and a linear arm servo that actually took the heads completely off the disc when parked. On a modern drive with a non-unloading angular arm and microscopic track spacing, I'd never even dream of attempting it.

If you just wanna pop a new drive in there and be done with it, then it doesn't really matter. Just match the physical interface (SATA vs. PATA) and be done with it. Speed, Capacity, these things matter not.