So I am over at my sister's place Friday night and she asked me if I would like a laptop. I said sure, let me take a look. It is an old Toshiba Tecra S1 that she got from work and it is actually in decent shape and solidly built. I have fiddled around with it for 2 days and suprisingly it is very stable.

It has the latest BIOS (from 2005) and I was able to upgrade the Intel wireless driver that was dated from 2006. All USB ports are working (unfortunately no S-Video or Firewire). It has Windows XP Pro and I was able to install SP2 without a hitch. The cpu is a 1.4 GHz Pentium M. It also has a DVDE/CD-RW drive.

The only thing that I see as a drawback (besides old tech) is that the harddrive is a mere 40 GBs. I know very little about laptop hardware except the basics so can anyone suggest what harddrive I should consider as a possible upgrade? I have done research but as I said I am pretty much a noob concerning laptop hardware especially older offerings.

Thanks.

What configuration is the HDD?

SATA, PATA or IDE, it seems to be IDE from what I can find but I need it confirming.
I've replaced a few Laptop HDD's so I know a bit about them and I'm on a Laptop now so I can help with this. If it is IDE I can't see any on Newegg.

In essence it is basically the same as a Desktop HDD. My Laptop used to have a 40Gb HDD I upgraded mine to 120Gb but mine was SATA and is only 2 years old Next Month since its Manufacturing.

Hey, Woody, with further research it is an IDE harddrive.

Hmm... Newegg don't seem to sell IDE HDD's or they must be known as ATA-6 HDD's on there?

It seems to be ATA on Newegg, that would really confuse people looking for IDE they may not know ATA is actually another name for IDE

Maybe you know some better sites than me, have a look around them and find 1 similar to the specs below on the UK Website I linked. That would be the Best sort of HDD you could get for the Laptop. Anything up to 250Gb seems to be around $100.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=304

It seems the WD Scorpio are some you may look at.

Yeah, that designation of ATA-6 is what throws me off. Does it mean the next step after IDE or does it mean the same thing? I don't know. Laptops are not my forte' especially since this one is 6 years old. ZipZoomFly appears to have both Hitachi and WD -- anyway, I think they do!

It does seem to be right, I did a bit of research and just looked on Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment

It seems they are the Same, Every ATA Drive is compatible with IDE but not all IDE are backwards compatible to ATA. In other words you can buy any ATA Drive and it should work, you can make up your mind from the Link above since it is your Money being spent on the HDD.

Hopefully this helps.

I was finally able to hunt down a good PDF concerning my particular model of the S1. The harddrive is an Enhanced IDE (ATA-5).

omg... maybe it would better to just open hdd cover on the bottom of laptop and tell us the model of installed hdd??

And you needed to answer, why?

The point is we knew it was IDE, we were trying to work out if it was compatible with ATA because it seems the Industry confuses things by saying ATA instead of IDE or mixing them up.

Oh and to be honest God isn't going to help us with this .