Which is better on these two laptop hard drives?

Question

Which is better? The OEM or the Retail:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductCompare.asp?Category=15&N=2010150380+4025&Submit=ENE&Nty=1&SubCategory=380&CompareItemList=N82E16822153023%2CN82E16822116022

What makes it better?

I have a dell Inspiron 1000

Answer 1

did you read the descriptions carefully?
the MHV2040BH is a SATA drive whilst the MHV2040AH is an ATA-133 drive.
if this disk is thought as a replacement for the existing one in your Dell 1000 laptop you need the ATA-133 disk (a SATA disk will not fit). in case you will use it as external disk then it depends only on the interface of the enclosure.

Answer 2

The one that's better is the one that will match your interface. One is Serial ATA and the other is Parallel ATA (commonly called IDE) and is labelled ATA-6 in the specs.. So if you're upgrading a laptop you have to know what interface you're connecting to.

That aside, in general terms, people prefer SATA because the interface has more headroom than PATA/IDE. But neither of the interfaces could get saturated with a single drive, so the head room makes no difference in most cases.

Answer 3

the retail is a much better one. the biggest difference is the interface by far. this spec is an important one here because it is a Serial ATA150 compared to a standard ATA-6 interface. you can do more with the serial ata. check your specs on your motherboard being it is new one and see if it has sata capabilities. chance are it does. if not the drive won't work..

Answer 4

The OEM hard drive comes as is, no cables, instructions etc which you would get with the retail version. If you are comfortable with installing hardware in your desktop, you should have no problems with the OEM version.

I've done this with several OEM hard drives which I've purchased from newegg. As long as you have the correct cables and jumper settings, you're good to go!