HD for a desktop

what?

IIRC only 3 companies left making hard disks.

For a half gig drive? That's 1TB drive money on Amazon. £35 for 500Gb, £70 for 2TB.

That's assuming SATA, however. IDE are very old tech now, smaller, and more expensive.

yerrs. I looked at 'upgrading' an old IDE lappie, and concluded i'd be better off with a SATA FLASH drive and an IDE adapter..

well you only have Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital to choose from these days ;(

Have you checked the power supply?

He might have looked at the solid state things. At a glance it looks like a straight HD in a picture.

All the main brands are mostly good, with the occasional screwup. I avoid freecom et al, the MTBFs I've seen didnt inspire much confidence

NT

Do you really need 500GB? SSD is smaller and more expensive, but might give the machine a decent performance boost.

Theo

I would have expected almost any machine originally supplied with XP would by now get a speed boost from a new hard drive. That being purely due to better performance of the drives - disregarding things like defragmentation and general clear-up.

He has cheap body parts then. Brian

I put a half a tb one in a laptop for just over 50 quid less than a year back, surely not that expensive.

Brian

I thought I saw a dongle to convert them to ide recently, but I guess ide will gradually get rarer as time passes so maybt such adaptors will eventually vanish. Brian

Quite. Bit too much of a coincidence.

If the machine checks out OK, I'd second the recommendations elsewhere for an SSD if space isn't too much of an issue.

got over 2TB altogether here.

Of course giving SWMBO a device to record TV onto the server..and a way for the sitting room TV to replay from the server...didnt help.

But it is a hell of a lot better than a vast bookcase full of DVDS and tapes half of which dont play the next time you try and use them

Then there are the photos we take...

Modern consumer drives focus on reduced power consumption, rather than speed. There _are_ performance-focussed drives, but they're spendier.

They still have somewhere around half the access time, larger cache, fancier built-in intelligence and much faster bus speeds from those of, say, six or seven years ago.

Faster bus speeds are bollock all use without the controller to match.

The old drive might not have been able to saturate the bus. Obviously I don't know the details in the OP's case. It was only one factor!