In reply to:

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I urge you to buy IBM Travelstar drives if you plan on upgrading. They seem to be the most tolerant of extreme temps.

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The older Travelstars I bought all work beautifully, but the one in my current Latitude (well, it's my employers' current Latitude) has a temperature-influenced "knocking" problem, namely, once it gets "too hot" (and I can't quantify that since I didn't realize what the problem was until it was "too late") it starts thermal recalibrating *a lot*. I ran Dell diagnostics and the drive checked out fine, except the disk read test too forever, because every time it "knocked", there was a delay reading. Dell of course says there's no problem.

A quick search of Google will turn up other people with the problem, and a friend with a slightly newer Inspiron seems to suffer sporadically from it as well. This thread on Google Groups covers it. This guy has the same laptop I do. Some confusion (look at the end of his post) with other issues seems to mask this, however, when you have it you'll know it. Eventually the drive gets so unhappy that it spins down entirely.