I have a laptop with a Toshiba MK6025GAS hard drive. Googling tells me this is an ATA drive.
It appears that this drive is about to die (blue screen of death, failed windows startup, “S.M.A.R.T. command failed” error on startup, but working ok right now.) So I’m looking for a replacement drive. I see a lot of drives with SATA or UATA, is this compatible with my laptop or must I get an ATA drive?
It’s very, very unlikely that you’ll be able to use anything other than a drive approved for the Toshiba and if you could it would have to be an ATA drive.
To clarify, the laptop is a no-name brand, the hard drive is a Toshiba.
It will need to be the ATA-6 spec, SATA will not work. The good news is that you can put in one of these:
for $69.00 and get a noticable speed boost. Your current drive is 4200RPM, try to get a 7200 like the one I linked to.
Not true, any 9.5mm ATA drive will work. The U in UATA stands for Ultra, a carryover from the ancient past. Any ATA drive you see today is UATA (including yours) and will work fine, but SATA won’t. Almost all laptop drives are also 9.5mm thick so take your pick. I’d recommend a 7200 RPM drive. They are very slightly louder and warmer, but will give you a noticably snappier system.
Having swapped out a few of these let me add that you should probably invest in a screwdriver that accepts standard 1/4" hex bits and get a set of small Torx bits and micro-sized Phillips (or one of those cheap set of jeweler’s Phillips drivers). Often times the various screws holding the laptop case together and the hard drive in its little tray use those and it’s frustrating to try and jury-rig something to take it apart. Worth a few bucks to have the right tools rather than stripping a screwhead.
Thanks for the help. I got myself a Seagate 80GB 7200 RPM hard drive which seems to be working well. Unfortunately the old drive suffered a fairly serious failure, and I don’t think I can recover anything off it unless I take to a store. Luckily I transfered the important files to a USB drive.