The neat thing about PCs is that they are totally modular; any disk that is of type "ATA" or "EIDE" (as opposed to "SCSI," which is rare) will work fine with your system, except possibly for the size limitation noted above. Two ways to fix that: (1) install an updated "BIOS" for your PC, or (2) partition the new drive into two 100GB drives.

If you are gunshy about opening up the PC, you can always have a tech person at an electronics store (CompUSA, Fry's, BestBuy, local PC store) do it for you for maybe $20. It's really pretty easy, and the instructions that come with the drive are might be all you need to do it yourself.

If you check out sites such as www.techbargains.com you'll often find 200GB drives for $120 and 160GB drives for $100 from places such as CompUSA and BestBuy. I've owned drives made by Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate, and they've all worked fine for me for years.

In the future, you'll probably find that buying ANYTHING through the official Dell website is more expensive unless Dell is running a huge rebate. I bought a 120GB drive from them last year for $20 ($170-60-80-10).

I'd check the Sundy supplements for Best Buy, CompUSA (that wonderful Mexican company), Office Depot, and Office Max for discounted and rebate laden drives at the size or above that you want. I would stick to the 7200RPM if I could. They are quite easy to install, and even if you don't want to do it yourself, you can find others to do it for you for a LOT less than buying a drive from Dell.

One possible problem. Dell for a while recently made certain cases that only accepted drives in a certain kind of carrier. There was no way to put the drive in without that carrier, and the carrier only came from Dell. There was so much protest from Techs in large companies that I BELIEVE that Dell stopped that crap, but I am not sure. (We stopped buying Dell machines for our labs, completely.) You might want to have a tech look at the inside of your machine before you buy a generic drive from one of the above mentioned places just to see what kind of mount rails it has inside.

Good luck.

> Dell for a while recently made certain cases that only accepted drives in a certain kind of carrier

I don’t know about the Dell 8200’s but my old Dell 8100 did not have any way to attach a drive that required screws on the sides. The screws had to be mounted on the bottom. So I could never attach my Soundblaster LiveDrive because it only had screw holes in the side. I would check to make sure the drive you buy can be mounted in your Dell case. I personally would never buy a Dell again. There is no reason for their incompatibilities other than to lock you into buying parts from them.

The other thing to watch out for is how much heat the new drive will produce. Those big drives run hot. My old Dell 8100 had no ventilation for the case! The only fan was hidden under a green shroud that covered the CPU only, so heat from things like my new graphics card and larger hard drives had no way to leave the case and it would spontaneously reboot from overheating. I finally had to run it with the side cover off to let the heat escape. Like I said, I would never buy a Dell again.

~jr

I am running the very drive you're talking about, with no problems.

However, you might want to make sure that your computer can address a hard drive greater than 137Gb. I had to jump through hoops to make mine work, which involved upgrading my ATA card from Promise. It was a flash-ROM upgrade, and after that I had to make Windows XP re-discover my hardware.

Otherwise, the drive really delivers for video and audio.