160GB IDE

There's a fun little stat in the hard drive business known as "Mean Time Between Failures". In other words, hard drives die (not if, but when). If your computer's main drive is of the older IDE variety, then timing is such that you may just be learning more than you care to about the ol' MTBF.

Today, these older IDE drives are almost a specialty item. They have a smaller capacity and are much more expensive than newer SATA drives. If your main hard drive is IDE and is about to go belly-up, this may be an opportunity to step on up to SATA.

Before you spend money on an IDE upgrade, check your motherboard and see if it has SATA ports -- they look like this:

If you do have SATA ports on your motherboard, you can get really a cheap SATA replacement hard drive (you may need to buy a SATA cable too).

If you can't find SATA ports in your computer, the 160GB IDE drive linked (above) retails for between $50 - $100. If you see a better deal out there (and can vouch for the quality of the manufacturer and seller), please consider leaving a comment here to let me know.

You can upgrade your old system to the new drive as follows:

1) Buy a new hard drive and, if you don't already have one, an external USB enclosure for it (this one works with both SATA and IDE drives).

2) Put the new drive into the enclosure and connect to the desktop

3) Use a disk cloning utility to make a perfect sector-by-sector copy of your original hard drive to the new one (in the enclosure)

4) Physically swap the drives -and- store your old one in the ol' firesafe, just in case. If something should go wrong in the future, you'll have this complete and bootable version of your machine as it stands today.

Throughout I've been assuming a desktop computer. Notebooks have to be pretty old to be stuck in IDE-land. But the principals are the same. Desktop drives; however, are 3.5" across and notebook drives are much thinner and only 2.5 inches wide. Make sure you don't get confused and buy the wrong size hardware for your machine.