[sandman01086]

the hard drive in my girlfriends pc is making an odd clicking sound and the pc is incredibly slow. i recently formatted due to it being filled up with god knows what. I was wondering if 1) the hard drive is dying and 2) if it is would a standard hard drive work in a bought pc?

it's an emachines 5240

cheers, jim

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Clicking noises and slowness are never good.
The hard drive will be a standard size so it's just a case of take the old one out, put the new one in and run your system recovery CD to set things up on the new drive.

[Neil Jones]

Clicking noises and slowness are never good.
The hard drive will be a standard size so it's just a case of take the old one out, put the new one in and run your system recovery CD to set things up on the new drive.

[sandman01086]

just to quickly check, all SATA drives are compatible with all motherboards with SATA ports? i know of SATA150 SATA2 and god knows what else

[Neil Jones]

According to your eMachines model you don't have a SATA drive. So to replace it in your eMachines it matters not about SATA types and what not.

[sandman01086]

there's a sticker on the front saying it's a SATA, i'll open it up and check what type it is

[sandman01086]

i opened up the case today and had a look and the hard drive was definately SATA, however the connector looked smaller then a standard SATA, is this another type of HDD or is it just me losing it in my old age?

[sandman01086]

hello?

[Neil Jones]

Hard drives are standard size so one size fits all.

[The Skeptic]

Basically there are 3 types of HD connections to the motherboard.

1: IDE. connected with a 40 pin flat cable.

2: SCSI. A flat cable that looks like IDE but is narrower and will not fit into IDE.

3: Sata. Much narrower then the other two. about 2 cm wide. Entirely different and doesn't even remotely resemble the first two.

If your old drive is Sata, then you can buy Sata 1 or Sata 2. If your computer supports Sata 2, then fine. If it doesn't, it will run the disk at Sata 1 mode.

[sandman01086]

excellent SATA = SATA whatever thanks a lot