T20 hard drive fried, replacement questions

[darkphader]

Hello,

New to the forum.

Started getting some weird errors on my trusty old T20 model 2647 and it's pretty clear the hard drive has bad blocks (dd writes and reads to certain blocks fail 100% of the time).

I know the laptop is a little "long in the tooth" but it was working fine and with a new faster hard drive it may be quite usable for some time.

Questions: Are these new 7k100 drives I've read about compatible with my system? Can I just take the original drive out and drop the new one in?

Also, they seem to be in short supply. Portable One claims they are in stock:http://laptopsinc.com/Merchant2/merchan ... ode=HDSTOR
And the 60GB is plenty of space for my needs but with the retail pricing of the 100GB model set at $263, $199 for the 60GB seems a bit pricey. Unfortunately I have found no other places to do a price comparison.

Thanks.

Chris

[GACrabill]

I'm in the same boat with a T22 ... I'm considering the 5K100 60GB ... fast enough for an older notebook and more reasonably priced at zipzoomfly or newegg.

[fredstev]

Guys, I just went thru this with my wife's T23. We had a sudden and catastrophic failure of the original hard drive. What I did is bought a new 60 gig Samsung 5400 rpm HDD on Ebay for about $76.00 and installed it. Piece of cake and bootup and disk access is noticably faster. I'm sure that the top of the line 7200 rpm drives are nice also, but my wife's thinkpad is just used for Email and running an embroidery machine so we had no need for cutting edge stuff.