Installing a hard disk drive.

There are a number of different hard disk types on the market we have SCSI “small computer system interface” , SATA “serial ATA”

But the the one we are installing here is the IDE type of drive which is the most common available.

Install hard drive article

Before installing or even purchasing there are a couple of points, IDE hard disk come in different sizes and speeds, if you have an older pc,

It may not be able to recognize hard drives over a certain size, this is worth checking. Also it may be a waste of money purchasing the latest fast hard drive if your computer cannot support it’s speed.

But there are however ways around this, if you find your pc cannot support the drive for one of the above reasons, you could purchase an ATA 133 high speed IDE controller card and run the drive(s) from this.

Install hard drive article

The next thing is to find out which kind of setup you would like the drive to have, most computers come with 2 onboard ide connections, the first is the primary and the other the secondary.

Your hard drive you boot from is called the master or disk 0 this will be connected to the primary IDE connector on the motherboard,

Install hard drive article

In total you can connect 2 IDE devices to each connector on the motherboard.

It will usually look something like this

Firstly check on the hard drive it will have a small jumper at the end with settings

Master Slave Cable select

These names will probably be abbreviated, you could quite easily just select

Cable select

This will define the role of the drive depending on which cable connector you connect it to, but if you want you can select “master” or “slave” depending again on the role of the drive.

Once you’ve connected the drive make sure that you also connect the power cable, there are only two cables to plug into the drive,

we’ve covered the IDE cable, the other is the power , it runs from the power supply.

Install hard drive article

If you are installing a new hard disk into a laptop obviously this will be a single drive setup, but even here you must check a couple of important facts before purchasing, will your laptop support the drive size?

Will it support the new drives speed and will it actually fit, al laptop drives are 2.5″ wide , but some do have different heights, the best way to find out is to remove the old drive and measure the height.

If your using windows 2000 go to the start menu, select run , type ” winmsd ” find the storage sub heading, expand it’s list by clicking on the cross and select disks ,

Here it will tell you the model number of the drive, just double check the specs of this drive on the web and you’ll be able to get the height.

Ok you’ve got the drive now you’ve got to install it, different laptop have different locations of hard drives,

Most you can get to easily from a panel on the bottom, but some are positioned under the keyboard.

Once you’ve removed the old hard drive you’ll need to remove it from it’s caddy, once this is done you just need to do the reverse, put the new drive into the caddy, put the caddy and drive back into the laptop and you should be finished .

Install hard drive article

Hint ..
ok you now have a spare laptop hard drive, why not convert this into an external backup device,

Look on e-bay and search for USB Caddy,

They are very cheap and it makes a very neat backup device which just plugs into your USB port.

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