Replace or fix laptop for 16 year old son for browsing and school work

[splunge]

My son's 3 year old Gateway nv55s28u laptop died (hard drive failed-HDD not recognized in BIOS)
The optical drive cover is broken but it otherwise worked OK.
Is it worth replacing the hard drive (last back up was a long time ago so recent data is lost I suspect) or buying a new one.

He uses it for word processing (school work), some java programming for his computer science class and watching videos.

I appreciate any advice!

 

[galeener]

If he doesnt need anything more hdds are cheap or even solid state drives are getting pretty cheap now.If you have a tight budget. But I am sure he would appriciate a new system sounds like for what hes doing a 400-500dollar laptop would work and probably speed things up a little for him. Like I said depends on your budget. a 500g 2.5" drive should be less that 60 bucks if thats the route you go. And hopefully you have a set up disk for the system somewhere.

 

[hang-the-9]

Aside from the laptop not seeing the hard-drive did you test the system or the drive? Try with an external adapter to see if a system will read the drive?

 

[splunge]

Thanks for the responses.
I tried a macrium rescue disk and it entered the windows environment on the disk (I forget the version) and did not identify the hard drive.
I tried removing and reinserting the HDD and no change, so i do believe it's a dead HDD.

Pardon m ignorance, is an external adapter a drive case to connect a USB cable? That's a good idea. i have an ancient one I still keep around that may be the correct configuration.

I went ahead and ordered a new HDD (hopefully compatible) on next day amazon for around $50 ( http/www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ISKS416?keywords=laptop%20hard%20drive&qid=1449172764&ref_=sr_1_2&refinements=p_85%3A2470955011&sr=8-2)
If I can squeeze 2 more years out of the laptop, we can buy him a nicer one for college. Hopefully it'll work and I can take data off the old drive with the external adapter.

 

[hang-the-9]

That is a "thin" model of drive, depending on how the case is on the laptop it may be too loose to sit securely in the system without an adapter.

Also Seagate has had some nasty reliability issues lately, there are tests where their desktop hard drives in a data center had like a 20% failure rate in not too long a time. This is from rackblaze testing, model, number of drives they had, average age of drive, and the annual failure rate. Only one other model of drive had an over 10% failure rate, most where in the low single digits.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
(ST31500341AS) 1.5TB 259 5.0 31.68%
Seagate Barracuda LP
(ST31500541AS) 1.5TB 1,485 5.1 12.16%
Seagate Barracuda LP
(ST31500542AS) 2TB 81 2.8 0.0%
Seagate Barracuda 7200.14
(ST3000DM001) 3TB 485 2.4 26.65%
Seagate Barracuda XT
(ST33000651AS) 3TB 234 3.2 3.05% 0.4% – 11.0%
Seagate Barracuda XT
(ST4000DX000) 4TB 175 1.9 4.62%
Seagate Desktop HDD.15
(ST4000DM000) 4TB 14,803 1.0 3.06%

 

[splunge]

The thin drive was a bit thin but made good contact and I was able to restore a Macrium reflect image and get it running. I hope, as long as he doesn't drop it or treat it rough, the thin drive will stay in place.