kathy nospam mail.invalid wrote:

Can I pick your brains about a hard drive upgrade.

I have an old desktop PC with a 250 MB hard drive. I would like
to increase the storage capacity and think 500 MB may be enough.

The new drive will replace the old one.

I notice that 500 MB is a size which I can now buy in 2.5 inch
format. Is a 2.5 inch drive likely to be better (faster, lower
power consumption, etc) than a 3.5 inch drive? Are the
connectors the same?

Or would it be better to install another 3.5 inch drive?

If you aren't just trying to increase the storage capacity...

What you really should do, if you are able, is buy a 120 GB SSD
and add (not replace) it to the system as the primary drive.
Reinstall Windows to that primary SSD. Then keep all of your data
files like multimedia on the 500 GB secondary hard drive.

Using an SSD for the primary and a conventional drive for the
secondary provides a huge throughput increase. It's not a whizbang
upgrade, but the speed improvements will be noticed in many
different ways.