I have an older computer at my office running Windows XP. The hard drive is approaching full. I’d like to add a hard drive. I’ve looked at the external ones, which I use with the big nitrogen-cooled supercomputer at home, but I’ve never installed an additional internal hard drive and I kinda would like to do that for this older machine. I’ve installed cards in various computers, memory modules, CD-ROM drives & DVD drives, but never an internal hard drive.
Would anyone know what I’m up against? What would I need to know about this computer to order the right kind of HD?
You need a belt with two slots, and a spare power line.
Plug both into the new drive, lined up so that the red edge on the belt matches the red wire on the power.
Away you go. There aren’t many traps.
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If two HDs share one belt, and one is significantly faster than the other, then the faster will be slowed down to the speed of the first, but that’s the only drawback.
You might also want to set the first as “master”, and the new hard drive as “slave”. Somewhere on the hard drive it should tell you what pins to put the jumpers on to set that up. http://freepctech.com/pc/001/installing_ide_devices.shtml
That website seems to give a pretty detailed explanation, and it has diagrams and pictures.
A lot of newer drives can work it out for themselves. I haven’t changed a jumper in a while. Read the back of the drive for instructions about jumpers.
If the computer is old, it probably don’t support the new serial-ata standard. You’ll have to find a common IDE drive (which uses a wider cable).
After that, the jumper configuration depends on how the primary hard drive and the cd-rom are installed, usually they work just fine when using the default “cable select” jumper position and plugging it in any free IDE connector, but other times you must first know how your other IDE drives are configured to jumper the new drive properly.
It’s not difficult but it could take a (very) little research first.