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Random Access Memory (RAM) in our computers only holds data while the computer is turned on. Your word processor sits in RAM – as does that five page document you expended two hours typing in. Turn your computer off, or (heaven forbid) you have a power cut, the contents of RAM is emptied and the word processor along with all that work plainly disappears in a flash. You plainly need a way to save your work and that’s where the hard disk drive (hdd) comes in. Essentially magnetic media, the disc (or platter) inside the hdd works in a similar way to a cassette tape in as much as the selective information on it doesn’t vanish when the power is turned off. But, after we have had our computers for a while, the hdd may either fill up or even start out to fail, causing slow loading times and error messages. In this article, we’ll look at the former – adding another hdd when your current hdd is full. How long your hard disk takes to fill up depends on how big it is and what you use your computer for. For a normal computer user, this may take a very long time. In fact, some users will never fill the hdd in their computer. But, if you’ve taken up novice photography for example, and take hundreds of photos a week, you may fill up the hdd in a few months. If you’ve purchased a new video camera and want to create, edit and store movies, filling a hdd may take place much quicker. So if you get a message on your screen telling you that you are getting low on disk space, it’s time to commence deleting stuff… or sort out a new hdd. Yes, you may always plug in an external USB hard disk, but if you are on a budget, you may fit an internal hdd for a lot less – or spend the same and get a much larger hdd! The actual routine is somewhat straight forward and if you know how to use a screwdriver you will have to find it rather easy. Preparation: The firstborn thing I do is check the computer’s BIOS to see the current hdd configuration. The probabilities are that the BIOS screen is something you’ve never seen before and I strongly suggest that after doing what I’m going to talk you through now, you don’t go into it again. We are only going to look at existent settings now, but there are things in the BIOS that you may change to the wrong values and even though your computer won’t blow up or anything drastic like that, you could stop Windows loading or even stop your computer from switching on. To get to the BIOS, turn on (or restart) your computer and watch the bottom of the screen for a message which tells you what to press to go into the Setup screen. On most computers it’s the Del key (the Supr key on Spanish keyboards where I live), but on a great deal of computers it’s the F2 or F10 key. I’ve even seen the Ctrl+S combining used. Once you’ve seen what key(s) you have to press on the screen, hit the Reset button on the front of your computer and start out tapping the required key(s) when you listen your computer ‘beep’. If all goes well, you will have to see a plain text screen (either blue or black) and the words BIOS or Setup at the top of the screen along with the name of the company who made the BIOS. Depending on the motherboard in your computer this could be Award (Phoenix), AMI (American Megatrends Inc) or galore other company. Award’s Phoenix bios is probably the most mutual and comprises of a number of ‘pages’ – displayed in two columns. Using the up, down, left and right cursor keys, you spotlight the page you want and press the enter key to enter the page. Pressing the Esc key backs out and returns to the former screen. Each page holds a number of choices which you may change. Right now, we only want to look at the hdd configuration and NOT alter anything, so that’s all I’m going to say when it comes to the BIOS for now. Other makers BIOS screens work in incisively the same way, but rather of two columns there may be a single column or even a menu running horizontally throughout the top of the screen. To see the hdd configuration in a Phoenix Award BIOS, you need to spotlight the Standard CMOS Features page and press Enter. My own computer has the AMI BIOS with the menu running all over the top and the equivalent of Award’s Standard CMOS Features page is the original page you see and is entitled ‘Main’ – you don’t need to select anything else. On this page, it shows all the available hdd ports (IDE and SATA) and the model name of the hdd which is attached to it. Models starting with ST are Seagate drives and those starting with WDC are Western Digital drives. Samsung and Toshiba genuinely say Samsung and Toshiba in the model name. If no hdd is connected to a port it may display ‘Not Detected’. My Asus motherboard only has a single IDE port (supporting two IDE drives, master and slave), along with four SATA ports. Your BIOS will in all probability be different. It may only display ports that drives are actually connected to. If your BIOS isn’t like those mentioned, you’ll plainly have to open each page in turn, looking for mention of Primary IDE Master, Slave, or SATA 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. Remember, spotlight a page, press Enter to go in and press the Esc key to back out if it doesn’t incorporate the data you are looking for. When you get to the screen which shows the drives in your computer, note down what they are connected to. This includes any CD/DVD-ROM drives. This selective information tells you what ports are free to connect the new drive to, but it’s likewise a quick indication of how successful the occupation was when you’ve finished. If you got everything right, the new drive will appear on the list. If not, it won’t appear and if you got the settings wrong on an IDE drive, the drive that was there before you started could likewise decrease rapidly off the list! Having got the selective information we need, as we have not made any changes in the BIOS, we may hold down the on/off button for 5 seconds to turn off the computer. Before we in truth start, you need to work out what you are going to need for the occupation – isolated from a Phillips cross-head screwdriver. For example, as a computer engineer, I have a big stock of cables I may select from, but the prospects are that you do not. The cable you buy (if you actually need one) depends on the hdd you buy. As there are dissimilar types of hdd, when you pop down to the local computer store, your buying goods list needs to have the rectify items on it. In a nutshell, you need to take a look inside your computer to see what’s in there already and what you may add. So, turn off the power switch at the back of the computer (if there is one) and unplug all the cables. If you aren’t sure where all the cables go, spend a few minutes drawing a picture for later on when everything is plugged back in. To be honest, isolated from USB devices, most of the cables will only plug into one hole. All USB appliances must work disregarding of which USB socket they are plugged into, but you may save yourself possible future hassles by plugging them all back in incisively the same place you unplugged them from. So if not one thing else, note where each USB plug goes. If you have a popular case desktop PC, you just need to remove the panel on the left hand side (while looking at it from the front). The side panel will have a 90ยบ lip at the back edge and there will be two Phillips screws securing it in place. Remove these two screws and slide the side panel towards the back of the computer and lift it away. Note: If you have a branded computer like a Dell, HP etc. opening it up may be dissimilar so you will need to refer to the documentation which came with it. Also, if it is still in warranty, (hopefully by now it won’t be), then opening the case may void the warranty, so be conscious of this. It has to be noted nevertheless that if you took it to your local computer shop, they too would have to open it up, so the result would be the same… In a general computer case, the CD-ROM/DVD drive(s) and hard disks will be mounted in bays at the front of the case. Optical drives like CD and DVD’s go in the more spectacular bays at the top and the hdd’s in the smaller, 3.5″ bays below. Locate your hdd and look at the back end which protrudes out of the rear of the bay. There are fundamentally three main types of hdd – IDE/ATA, SATA and SCSI. IDE is still the most normally found type of hdd out in the wild, but is tardily being substituted by the rapidly and without delay SATA standard. All new computers purchased today have SATA drives. SCSI is seldom applied in relation to IDE and SATA, but is still available and have a tendancy to be found only in more specialist computers. What Drive Do I Have Already? All three types of drives are finelooking much identical in physical size, but differ in the cables applied to attach them to the system. As we need to look inside your computer to find out what free connectors are available, while we do that we may also without apparent effort check what type of drive(s) you have already. How To Detect If You Have An IDE/ATA Drive: IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is the basi Western Digital name for the interface usual which ultimately evolved into the ATA (AT Attachment) interface frequent presently in use today. Older motherboards had 2 IDE connectors (primary and secondary) and with each one being capable to support a master and slave device, up to four drives (any combining hard disks or CD-ROMs) could be connected. ATA drive data cables are flat ribbon cables, commonly grey, approximately 5cm wide and having 3 x 40 pin connectors attached – one at each end and another portion of the way along it. If you presently have a single IDE/ATA drive, the ribbon cable will be connected to the motherboard at one end, to the drive in all probability using the ‘master’ connector at the opposite end and have a spare unused ‘slave’ connector around 15-20cm from the end. Note: If you likewise have an IDE CD-ROM or DVD drive, it could be attached to the slave connector on the same necessary IDE cable as the hdd, or attached on it’s own using the secondary IDE cable. Looking at the back of an IDE hdd, the 4 pin Molex 8981 power connector is located on the far right and the connector plug is female with 1 red, 1 yellow and 2 black wires. How To Detect If You Have A SATA Drive: Serial ATA (SATA) drives initial appeared in 2003 and were quicker versions of the former ATA (IDE) drives. ATA was subsequently renamed to Parallel ATA (PATA). Today, almost all new computers, laptops and netbooks are supplied with SATA drives as standard. Although most new motherboards still have a single old IDE connector on them for backwards compatibility, they ordinarily have four or more of the newer SATA connectors. SATA selective information cables are likewise flattened, but not as flat as IDE ribbon cables and nowhere near as wide. At around 1cm wide and more or less thicker, they come in respective colours. I have red, blue, yellow and black SATA selective information cables. Unlike IDE cables though, they only have one drive connector. As such, each SATA drive needs it’s own data cable. If you have a SATA drive, follow the flat info cable back to the motherboard and you will have to see that it plugs into a SATA socket. There must be four, but it doesn’t matter as long as there is one free. Looking at the back of the hdd, the SATA power connector is located on the far left and the power cable has 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 black and 1 orange wire. The selective information cable plugs in just to the right of the power cable with little or no gap between. Most modern power furnishes have both IDE and SATA power connectors. How To Detect If You Have A SCSI Drive: The third and last hdd type uses a standard called Small Computer System Interface (SCSI – pronounced ‘scuzzy’) and altho they are nice and fast, they are likewise very expensive, so it’s highly improbable you will already have one of these in your computer without knowing regarding it already. Most motherboards do not have a SCSI interface built in, so you may commonly spot these drives as the info cable from the back of them normally connects to a SCSI interface card rather of directly onto the motherboard. The selective information cable on a SCSI drive is just like an IDE ribbon cable, but much wider, so if the info cable on your hdd is wider than the one on the CD-ROM drive then you’ve got a SCSI drive. The power connector is also precisely the same as on an IDE drive. If you need another one of these drives, your local computer shop may have to order it for you as they aren’t always stock items – or you could probably order one online a lot cheaper. Decision Time Your computer right now in all probability has a single hard disk and a single CD/DVDROM drive, but to be honest, it doesn’t in truth matter if the current hdd is the older IDE/ATA interface. If your motherboard supports SATA drives, I suggest you go for one as they are quicker and in general more comfortable to get hold of – unless cost is an issue and you may get your hands on a decent sized second hand IDE drive for next to nothing. Either way, all you need is a free power connector and a selective information cable for the drive you end up getting. Note: You do not have to stick to the type of drive you presently have. If you have an IDE drive you may still add a new SATA drive and vice-versa. To Sum Up: * If your computer has an IDE ribbon cable with a free connector, as well as a free IDE power connector you may safely buy an IDE disk drive. * If your computer only has a single IDE ribbon cable and both master and slave connectors are in use, as long as your motherboard has an unused secondary IDE port you may safely buy an IDE disk drive, but you will likewise need to buy another IDE cable for it. * If your computer has a free SATA port on the motherboard and your power supply has a free SATA power connector you may safely buy a SATA disk drive. If you don’t have one, you will likewise need to buy a SATA info cable. * If you have no free IDE or SATA connections and no free IDE or SATA power connectors, you will probably find it for less and having little impact to get an external USB drive. Tip! If you buy your new drive from your local computer shop, ask them if they trade 6-32 UNC drive mounting screws. Most of us who work with computers for a living have thousands of them lying around so the chances are they’ll give you a handful for free! Installing The Drive: Having got your new drive and if necessary, the rectify data cable for it, all we need to do now is install it. SATA Drives If your drive is a SATA drive, there’s no configuration involved you may just pop it into an empty bay and screw it in. There are four screws – two each side, but if I’m honest, I only ever use two screws because you have to take the other case side panel off to put them in. If I go back to a machine at a later date and have to take the drive out, it’s a time saver only having to remove one side panel to do it. The drive bays have help rails either side which keep the drive horizontal and the two screws you do put in prevent it from moving, so the other two screws genuinely aren’t necessary. Next, you connect the SATA power cable to the drive. The power connector plug has an ‘L’ shaped ridge in it which only matches up with the groove on the drive connector when it’s the rectify way round, so don’t strength it. Finally, you connect one end of the SATA info cable to the motherboard and the other end to the drive. Like the power cable plug, the info cable has the ‘L’ shaped ridge so match them up before attempting to strength them in. Note: The plugs on the end of a SATA cable are identical, so it doesn’t matter which end plugs into the drive and which plugs into the motherboard. And that’s all there is to installing a new SATA drive. IDE/ATA Drives As an IDE cable may have two gadgets attached – like a hdd attached as a master and a CD_ROM attached as a slave, all IDE appliances have to be set as either master or slave and have the rectify connector attached. Setting the device is done with a tiny jumper which shorts out two pins on the back of the device. Each hdd manufacturer may have dissimilar jumper settings, so on the top of the drive you will find a sticker showing the respective jumper configurations. For example, on Seagate drives, shorting out the two pins furthest away from the power socket by placing a jumper on them makes the drive the master device. Leaving the jumper off the same two pins sets the drive as a slave device. On an IDE ribbon cable, there are three connectors. Two are closer together at one end and it is these that plug into the two IDE devices. The one on it’s own at the other end plugs into the port on the motherboard. Of the two connectors close together, the one on the very end of the cable is plugged into the master device and the other one into the slave device. So, once you have decisive which connector is going to be plugged into your new drive, you may set the jumper accordingly. A second hdd will work fine set as a slave as long as the slave cable connector is plugged in, but if given the choice I would always add a new hdd as a master on the secondary IDE channel with a new IDE cable – even if the slave connector on the primary IDE channel was free. In theory altho it shouldn’t make any divergence and in any case, the probabilities are your master and slave on the crucial IDE channel are already taken with your hdd and CD/DVD-ROM drive. If so, set the new drive to master and when you connect the new IDE cable, plug the master connector (the one on the very end) into the drive. You may now put the drive into a free bay and screw in the two screws. Attach either the free connector on the existent IDE ribbon cable to the drive, or connect one end of your new IDE ribbon cable to the motherboard and the other end to your new hdd. Note: One edge wire of the IDE ribbon cable will be marked in a dissimilar colour to make it stand out. This is to support when plugging it in as the connector will only fit one way round. When the marked wire is nearest to the power connector, the cable will be in the right way oriented, to plug in. Finally, plug the new drive’s power connector in. This has chamfered edges at the bottom so it too may only be plugged in one way round. When the power plug is the rectify way round, the yellow wire is nearest to you when looking into the case from the left side. At this point, you will have to be done and in a perfective world you would put the side panel back on, connect all the cables and power on your machine. But it might be wise to leave the side panel off a while longer while you connect the cables and power up – just in case there’s a problem and you need to go back in and modify anything. As described right at the beginning of this article, power up, go back into the BIOS and go to the page which lists your drives. If a new hdd model number has appeared next to a port which wasn’t there before and those that were there before are all still there, then congratulations – you’ve with great success installed your new hard disk! If the new drive doesn’t appear (or one disappears), you now have to get started the trouble-shooting phase. At this point, we have no changes to save in the BIOS so we may hold down the on/off button to turn off the computer. Trouble-Shooting: First check that all cables are present and with resolute determination pushed in. With the computer turned off, place the metal end of your Phillips screwdriver in one of the screw holes of the new hdd’s case and push the screwdriver handle to your ear. Turn on the PC and if the drive powers up, you’ll listen the hdd drive motor whine and clicking noises through the screwdriver. If there’s no sound or vibration, swap the power connector with a working drive and check again. If there’s still nothing, you have a dead drive and ought to return it. If it starts working, undertake the initial power connector in the other drive. If that’s now dead, use another power connector (there’s ordinarily a couple unused). If the drive you installed is an IDE drive and is powering up OK and/or a antecedently working IDE drive has disappeared of the list in the BIOS then you have set the master/slave configuration jumper incorrectly. On an IDE ribbon cable, only one device may be master – the other must be set to slave. Set them both to the same and neither will be detected by the BIOS. Also with IDE drives, make sure that the drive set as master is attached to the connector on the END of the IDE cable and the drive set as slave is attached to the other connector. With new SATA drives, you may do the screwdriver test for power, but there are no jumpers to get wrong, so make sure the power is off and try connecting the data cable to another SATA port on the motherboard. Assuming all has gone to plan so far, you will have to be competent to turn on your computer and it will boot into Windows as normal. If you have Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 then your new drive must be detected mechanically as new hardware. Just wait for the ‘your new hardware is ready to use’ message. New drives will have to have one (or more) partitions produced on them and then formatted before you may use them. In some versions of Windows a good deal of or all of the procedure may be automatic and you may just see a pop-up box asking if you want to format the new drive. You may just say yes. I use Windows XP and this routine has to be done manually, but it’s rather easy to do and covered in my article ‘Preparing A Hard Disk For Use In Windows XP’. Most helpful customer reviews 85 of 85 people found the following review helpful. 33 of 33 people found the following review helpful. I would buy this product again. 25 of 25 people found the following review helpful. I finally smartened up and bought the Cables To Go adapter and it has made the task of hooking up a bare drive so much easier and faster. Now all I have to do is plug two cables into my bare SATA drive, power up the drive, and then hook up the USB cable to my computer. The HD mounts up quickly and I’m then able to do whatever I’d normally be able to do with the HD whether it’s transfer files off or on to it, run diagnostics on it… whatever. This solves a problem for me and does so very reliably and inexpensively. I give it 5 stars. The only thing you need to be careful of is that you will end up with some cable clutter on your desk, so you must use caution in placement of the bare HD, the power brick and cables so that you don’t accidentally disrupt data transfer that might be in progress. Take that precaution and you should be a happy camper. I’m so glad I have this. It has really made it super easy to hook up bare drives now and for that I am grateful. |
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