Right now all i have is a maxtor 20g internal hard drive. I've been thinking that I need another hard drive maybe 80 or 120g. Are hard drives easy to install? Is OEM okay or do I need some accesories? My current hard drive is Ultra ATA/100. There is a slot below and above my current hard drive. There is also a gray ribbon plug and a plug that has two black wires, a yellow, and red coming out of it. There are extra plugs that seem to correspond to the extra slots. Are those for hard drives? The slots are about one inch. The slot that the current hard drive is in has some extra metal piece because the hard drive is 11/16 of an inch and the slot is 1in. Is that the size of a regular hard drive. Also, If a get another hard drive will I be able to install games on it and still access them from the start menu or will I have to go into My Computer or Explore? Thanks!
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hard drive
- Thread starter rik224224
- Start date
Yes, hard drives are easy to install.
OEM is fine, all you need are cables. This is why OEM drives are popular. I have found ZipZoomFly to have lowest hard drive prices but shop around since I have not priced hard drives for at least two months.
You should look at IDE drives since I do not think you have a SATA controller on your motherboard. You will know if you have SATA or not.
With IDE drives, there are typically two connections on the motherboard. Each connection possesses a wide ribbon cable, which contains either 40 or 80 pins. Each of these two cables has two connections at the end for a Master drive and a Slave drive. It does not matter which drive is connected to which connection since the Master and Slave designation is determined by the jumper position on each of the drives. The jumpers are easy to forget to position properly. The second cable typically also connects with the cd/dvdrom drive.
I would recommend a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 like this. Another possibility is Samsung. Seagate and Samsung are currently the most favored but really any of these drives are good: Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, Maxtor.
An important consideration with hard drives is the quality of the power supply since hard drives are extremely vulnerable to power supply fluctuations. Read Power Supply 101 for more information. You will probably be fine with the power supply you have now though. Just remember this in case you have problems in the future.
Another important consideration is overheating the hard drives. It is good to put hard drives in the bottom most slot with an empty slot just above it. It may also be a good idea to purchase a case fan and put this behind the hard drives to blow air on the hard drives and keep them cool. Overheating is a leading cause in early failure for hard drives.
Once you have the hard drive and a cable to connect it to the motherboard with, ensure the jumper is in its correct position for placement of the drive on its cable. Once the drive is installed, you will run the diagnostic utility on it to test the drive and then set up the drive for installation.
You can easily partition and format the hard drive from within your operating system with Disk Management.
You can access Disk Management by:
right-click on My Computer, select Manage, select Storage/Disk Management
EDIT:
for more knowledge concerning hard drive partition strategies, you can google drive partition strategy and you can also read this thread Why partition a hard drive???. It is not required to partition your drive with any special strategy. Partitioning and formating the drive as a D: drive with your operating system on your current 20GB drive is acceptable.
EDIT 2:
It may also be a good idea to consider purchasing a UPS battery backup with undervoltage regulation to protect the hard drives (and rest of the system) from power fluctuations.
You may want to devote half of your new hard drive as a backup partition or consider a backup routine.
OEM is fine, all you need are cables. This is why OEM drives are popular. I have found ZipZoomFly to have lowest hard drive prices but shop around since I have not priced hard drives for at least two months.
You should look at IDE drives since I do not think you have a SATA controller on your motherboard. You will know if you have SATA or not.
With IDE drives, there are typically two connections on the motherboard. Each connection possesses a wide ribbon cable, which contains either 40 or 80 pins. Each of these two cables has two connections at the end for a Master drive and a Slave drive. It does not matter which drive is connected to which connection since the Master and Slave designation is determined by the jumper position on each of the drives. The jumpers are easy to forget to position properly. The second cable typically also connects with the cd/dvdrom drive.
I would recommend a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 like this. Another possibility is Samsung. Seagate and Samsung are currently the most favored but really any of these drives are good: Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, Maxtor.
An important consideration with hard drives is the quality of the power supply since hard drives are extremely vulnerable to power supply fluctuations. Read Power Supply 101 for more information. You will probably be fine with the power supply you have now though. Just remember this in case you have problems in the future.
Another important consideration is overheating the hard drives. It is good to put hard drives in the bottom most slot with an empty slot just above it. It may also be a good idea to purchase a case fan and put this behind the hard drives to blow air on the hard drives and keep them cool. Overheating is a leading cause in early failure for hard drives.
Once you have the hard drive and a cable to connect it to the motherboard with, ensure the jumper is in its correct position for placement of the drive on its cable. Once the drive is installed, you will run the diagnostic utility on it to test the drive and then set up the drive for installation.
You can easily partition and format the hard drive from within your operating system with Disk Management.
You can access Disk Management by:
right-click on My Computer, select Manage, select Storage/Disk Management
EDIT:
for more knowledge concerning hard drive partition strategies, you can google drive partition strategy and you can also read this thread Why partition a hard drive???. It is not required to partition your drive with any special strategy. Partitioning and formating the drive as a D: drive with your operating system on your current 20GB drive is acceptable.
EDIT 2:
It may also be a good idea to consider purchasing a UPS battery backup with undervoltage regulation to protect the hard drives (and rest of the system) from power fluctuations.
You may want to devote half of your new hard drive as a backup partition or consider a backup routine.
Since I recommended a specific hard drive, it would only be proper to introduce two Seagate Hot Deals that are currently in the Hot Deals category.
Seagate 200GB Ultra ATA/100 8MB Buffer $29.99 after Rebate
200 GB Seagate ATA drive for 49.99 after 50 MIR at Fry's and Outpost
Seagate 200GB Ultra ATA/100 8MB Buffer $29.99 after Rebate
200 GB Seagate ATA drive for 49.99 after 50 MIR at Fry's and Outpost
FlyingPenguin
Golden Member
If you have an older system (as seems obvious if you had a 20Gb drive installed) I would avoid anything larger than a 120Gb drive unless you make sure of the following:
Requirements for support of 48-bit LBA (Exceeding 137Gb HDD size limit):
OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or better or Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or better
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:
Your hard drive controller must support 48bit LBA (Large Block Addressing) - check the motherboard manufacturer's website for BIOS update and/or motherboard chipset driver update that MAY add this ability.
Alternately, you can install an add-on 48bit LBA capable controller card.
Requirements for support of 48-bit LBA (Exceeding 137Gb HDD size limit):
OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or better or Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or better
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:
Your hard drive controller must support 48bit LBA (Large Block Addressing) - check the motherboard manufacturer's website for BIOS update and/or motherboard chipset driver update that MAY add this ability.
Alternately, you can install an add-on 48bit LBA capable controller card.
This is very true. It would improve the system speed to use the new and faster hard drive for the C: partition with the system files. I wrote that in my initial recomendation but then thought better against it and decided to recomend different partition strategy articles to read for more information.Originally posted by: wpshooter
I would have them consider reinstalling their operating system, etc. to the new hard drive in that I believe they would get better performing system, but that may be too much for them at this point !!!
Maybe a drive copy will do this. rik224224, when you set up your drive, the manufacturer's diagnostic utility may have a drive copy program that will allow you to copy all of your files from your old 20GB drive to your new hard drive. I would recommend doing this so you may take advantage of the faster speed of your new hard drive.
FlyingPenguin's advice is also perfect. I tend to forget about that little detail 🙂 since I usually partition my hard drives with FreeBSD's sysinstall, which is typically not affected by bios limitations on hard drive size.