New Harddrive for laptop

Eircom_Sucks

turned on my Dell Laptop this morning and got a warning about dark drive failure

smart failure predicted on hard disk 0 toshiba etc

warning : immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive . a failure may be imminent

press f1 to continue




now i took out the hard drive and put it back in hoping it may reset or something but the same message comes up

where is the best place to buy a internal hard drive ?

You can't reset a SMART fail. It means some error parameter (bad sectors, read error rate etc) has gone over the limit of what the drive manufacturer considers healthy. If you are curious you can use software such as CrystalDiskInfo to check what has caused the SMART fail to trigger.

The first priority is to backup anything on the drive you consider important if you didn't have backups already.

Depending on how old the laptop is, the drive may be under warranty. If not I would just get a new one from Dabs, Amazon, etc. If the laptop is modern you need a 2.5" SATA drive. If its very old you might need a 2.5" IDE/PATA

Torqay

Eircom_Sucks wrote: »

where is the best place to buy a internal hard drive ?

A computer store maybe?

If you don't need massive space, consider a solid state disk, 128 GB SSDs from 87 Euro at komplett.ie

Eircom_Sucks

Deleted User wrote: »

You can't reset a SMART fail. It means some error parameter (bad sectors, read error rate etc) has gone over the limit of what the drive manufacturer considers healthy. If you are curious you can use software such as CrystalDiskInfo to check what has caused the SMART fail to trigger.

The first priority is to backup anything on the drive you consider important if you didn't have backups already.

Depending on how old the laptop is, the drive may be under warranty. If not I would just get a new one from Dabs, Amazon, etc. If the laptop is modern you need a 2.5" SATA drive. If its very old you might need a 2.5" IDE/PATA

its 18 months old

Torqay wrote: »

A computer store maybe?

If you don't need massive space, consider a solid state disk, 128 GB SSDs from 87 Euro at komplett.ie

lol i asked for that , i meant cheapest place online

Torqay

Eircom_Sucks wrote: »

i meant cheapest place online

The cheapest place to buy online is probably somewhere Far East, but longer delivery times and sometimes a dodgy warranty.

But you were asking for the best place, that again depends, if you need it immediately, a local store is your best bet, you'll pay maybe 60-100 yoyos, depending on the size.

If you want to buy online, komplett.ie is OK for an "Irish" web shop.

Again, unless you need massive space for a large media collection, I recommend getting a solid state disk. The speed blows any platter hard drive out of the water and by nature they are much more robust than conventional HDDs.

Eircom_Sucks

Eircom_Sucks wrote: »

its 18 months old

Then it's 2.5" SATA and it should be under warranty. Obviously you need to check both yourself to confirm.

Get the model # and serial from CrystalDiskInfo (or any HDD diagnostic) and then go to the HDD manufacturer website and see if they have a warranty status checker.

Alternatively the manufacturer of the laptop may be the one who handles the warranty. Either way you should have a two year warranty by law.

While your at it, get the diagnostic directly from the manufacturers website and run it, it should give you a fail message or fail code. Its the first thing they'll suggest to do when you try to return it anyhow.

Just to re-iterate, all this stuff should be done AFTER you back up important stuff. The drive could go kaput at any moment, so quickly back stuff up to CD, external drive, dropbox, whatever you have available