Installing an extra hard disk
Posted on 30. Sep, 2008 by Mike Halsey in hardware
If you have a lot of digital photographs or music, or you just want to move your files away from your Windows installation to keep them secure, but either don’t have access to partitioning software, or aren’t confident enough to use it, then installing another hard disk in your PC is a good option.
Before installing a hard disk
Remember to earth yourself. Static electricity can blow the more fragile components in a computer. Once you have taken the side off the case, touch the power supply with your hand, this is the big box, usually at the rear-top of the case into which the power lead is plugged. This will earth you. Then, while still touching the power supply, pull the power cable out with your other hand. Also try and avoid working on nylon carpet as this will generate static electricity more easily.
Hard disks are really cheap and very simple to install. There are two types…
Parallel (PATA) disks
These type of disks have been around now for decades and have been superceded by SATA serial drives (see below) but you might still have a PC that’s not compatible with the newer system.
There are three ports on the back…
- The power socket takes a big while plug, known as a molex connector.
- The Data socket takes a long ribbon cable. There are two types of ribbon, 40 core and 80 core. The easy way to tell is to see roughly how many strands are in it and what it’s plugged into. 40 core cable will only be used for floppy disk drives and, as you’ll already have a hard drive, it’ll be plugged in with 80 core cable.
- The jumpers will give you several options and you should check the jumper settings on your existing hard disk.
- Master, this will make it your primary drive. If your existing hard disk is set to master then you should set the second drive to…
- Slave, a subservient drive of the master
- Cable Select, if your primary drive is set to this then your second drive should be as well. This setting allows the PC to decide itself which is the master drive.
Plugging the drive in is a very simple matter. Both the power and data cables will only go in one way. The data cable that plugs into your current hard drive will have another plug on it. You should use this for your second drive. If your PCs motherboard does not accept the new SATA drives (check your manual for references to SATA) then you will only be able to have two hard drives installed.
If you find that your computer can’t see the drive, or Windows will suddenly not boot, try changing the jumper settings on the new, or both, disks.
SATA, serial drives
These are the most common disks today and don’t have fiddly jumpers to play with. They’re even easier to install, just two sockets, one for power and the other for data.
You might find you have a SATA drive that has an older style white molex power socket. You can see one on the far left of this picture. The slim wire is your data cable and the larger one is the power lead. If you have both types of power socket on the drive, only use one!
Again these plugs will only go on one way round so it’s impossible to wire them up incorrectly. It should be easy to find the data cable socket on your motherboard as nothing else looks like them.
If you find that you don’t have a SATA power plug in your PC then you’ll need a molex to SATA power adapter (see right). These are cheap and easy to find on the internet and in any electronics or compuer store.
Your new drive will now show up in Windows but you may need to format it before it can be used. Windows will prompt you if this is the case.
Should you want to move your files, music and photographs over to it to keep them away from your Windows installation (which I strongly recommend) then the instructions are in my Backups, part 1 article.
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