As time goes on, you will load more and more software onto your computer. You will also create more and more data files of your own. All of these files will gradually fill even the largest of hard drives. Depending on how big a hard drive you start with and how quickly you fill it, the hard drive may fill up while the rest of your computer system is still quite satisfactory to operate the software that you run. In this case you don't really want to purchase a whole new computer to increase the capacity of your system, you just need a new hard drive.
When it comes to purchasing your new hard drive you have several choices. You can either buy a new drive to replace your existing drive or you can buy a new drive to use in addition to your existing drive. If you are going to keep your existing hard drive then there are also options (more expensive certainly) that allow the new hard drive to be removeable which means that you can store it separately from your system for security of its content and also you can purcase additional removeable drives that can be swapped in giving even greater capacity to your system.
If you are replacing your existing drive then you will definitely want to take a backup of your data before you start and it's a good idea to do so even if you will be keeping your existing drive as well as adding the new one. Another option to consider if you are going to replace the existing drive is that temporarily having both drives in the system will make it much easier for you to copy your current drive contents across to the new drive. Even if you have to temporarily disconnect one of your other drives (eg. cd rom) while you do this you can always change things back once you have the drive copied. There are plenty of software programs out there that can handle copying your hard drive for you.
Most hard drives attach to your computer's IDE bus which allows up to four drives to be attached. If all four available locations are already in use with hard drives, cd rom drives, dvd drives, zip drives etc. then you will either need to replace an existing drive with the new hard drive or install a SCSI hard drive. There are a few motherboards that have a SCSI interface built in but most require the use of a separate interface card. If you don't already have a SCSI bus then purcasing a new SCSI hard drive will mean that you also need to purchase a SCSI card. SCSI can handle up to seven (or in some cases 15) drives on the one card so once you have a SCSI interface adding additional drives (or any of a variety of other SCSI devices) becomes a simple matter of setting each to a different SCSI id and making sure the terminators are in the right place.
IDE drives are slightly more complicated to install but as that is more likely to be the type of hard drive that you'll choose I'll deal with that for the rest of this article. Your motherboard will have two IDE connectors on it (primary and secondary) each of which can have up to two devices attached (master and slave). The hard drive that you boot from will be attached as the primary master (or may be the only drive attached to the primary). If you are replacing your existing hard drive you will want to unplug the cable from the old drive and plug it into the new one. If you are adding the new hard drive and keeping your existing one as well then you will want to connect the new drive as primary slave. This means that you will need to check the jumpers attached to the back of both your existing and new hard drives to make sure that one is configured as master and the other as slave. Most hard drives have the jumper configurations marked on the drive itself, if not you will need to check the documentation that came with the drive or look for the info on the drive manufacturer's web site.
Once the new hard drive is physically installed into your system the next step is to get your system to recognise the new drive. This will mean booting your system and pressing the appropriate key (usually DEL) to get into your system BIOS. The IDE configuration can usually be found on the first page of the BIOS settings. You will either need to manually enter the actual configuration of your new hard drive in on this page or alternatively us an auto detect option within your BIOS to have the computer detect the appropriate settings for you. Another thing to watch for (particularly if your existing hard drive is less than 8Gb in size) is that the access mode for the new hard drive needs to be set to LBA (or if your BIOS doesn't have that setting then try LARGE). This is because the NORMAL access mode has a maximum address space of 8Gb and therefore wont be able to see the rest of any larger drive. You will want to make sure that the settings for your existing hard drive are not changed or you may lose access to everything on the drive (see you should have backed up first). Depending on which operating system you are running you may also need to install new driver software so that the operating system can recognise the new larger hard drive. There are pages about how to do this for OS/2 and Windows NT on our web site.
Installing a new hard drive in your system isn't a trivial exercise but it isn't all that difficult either and increasing your hard drive capacity may significantly extend the useful life of your existing computer.
Stephen Chapman runs a computer help website at http://www.felgall.com/
Internet design/development ebooks and software at http://members.felgall.com/
Javascript help at http://javascript.about.com/
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
