what hard drive? also system restore question

dean_ham

dean_ham

dean_ham

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S.Wales
Hi, i have a basic dell dimension 2400 which is fine for what i use (surfin net, playing music etc) but now the 80gb hd is full and i cannot delete anything else so time to buy a 2nd hard drive for all my junk. I am ideally looking for around the 150-250gb mark. I have no idea what makes are better than others and i take it that an IDE setup would need to be used for my system?

Also because its a dell pc, it comes with a system restore disc. If i do install a 2nd harddrive and when the time comes to restore the system, will having an additional hard drive cause any problems? Will i lose any info on the 2nd hard drive or does it just wipe the C:/ drive clean and start afresh when inserting the system restore cd?

Thanks for reading

Dean
 
Hi, double check you don't have any SATA ports free, just in case and find out what controller they run on. You'd probably need drivers to be installed for this before windows would see the drive though this is controller dependent.

If you want to go the IDE route, you'll have to setup the jumpers on the harddrive, other than that, it should be a breeze to install.

Onto your system restore question - well, when using the restore disk, it should only wipe C: and leave all other drives where they are, however if you want peace of mind, just unplug the hard drive (storage - 2nd one) and then run the restore disk and that way it won't be able to touch it. Make sure though, that when you install the second one, when it comes to formatting it, set it up as a basic partition - though you can come back for more help when you have chosen/bought the disk.

I prefer SATA drives because of the cabling which is much smaller however you may need a molex (normal 4 pin) > SATA power converter for the drive and also a SATA cable if none were supplied with the PC (both of which should cost a combined £4). I'd personally go for SATA if you have SATA ports, but if not, then IDE is fine also. Either way, I highly recommend Seagates (7200.9 series) and Hitachi's (T7K250 series).
 
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