I have a Dell Dimension 8300 and i’m thinking that i want to add some hard drive space. I’ve never fooled around much with the inside of computers, and i’ve never built my own, but i think that i want to buy an internal drive and install it myself. From what i’ve read in other threads, this isn’t an especially difficult task.
The question i have is which drive to buy.
The first part of the question relates to what type of drive to buy. According to the specs that came with my computer, my current drive is a 160GB Serial ATA hard drive. What i want to know is whether a second hard drive also has to be SATA, or whether it can be regular IDE Ultra ATA? And, if it can be either, is there any practical difference in performance between the two types?
If it helps at all, my computer’s spec book says:
I’d open it up and look inside, but i really don’t know what to look for.
The second part of the question relates to brand. Some browsing and some reading suggest that Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital seem to be the most prominent names on the market. I’ve looked at a few places online, and the prices seem to be around $110 for a 160GB IDE drive (Maxtor, Seagate) and $130 for a 160GB SATA drive (Maxtor, Seagate).
If anyone has any advice on any of this, i’d be most grateful.
There is no problem at all in having a second IDE harddrive with a SATA primary - I just go a new serial drive a couple days ago, and set it up with the fresh install of Windows, relegating my old IDE hard drive to a backup position, with no difficulties related to the drives themselves.* Your machine has two IDE channels, one of which I presume is being used by your optical drives. Simply set the IDE drives jumpers to master/single (should be on the label of the drive, plug into the unused IDE slot and a free power connector, turn on, make sure drive shows up in bios, let it reboot, and then go into the disk managment and format the new disk.
Note that I would go with a serial ATA drive, even with price difference; Serial ATA is slightly faster theoritcally (though most of the time the physical drives can’t keep up) but the big reason is that Serial ATA cables are much easier to deal with - they use a rather thin little cord, rather the PITA ribbions used in IDE drives.
As for the brand, well, I decided to try Hitachi this time (I know they have had some problems in the past, but the local computer store said the newer ones were fine, they use them in their machines, and I have known them for a while.) and I paid $135 for a 200GB 8mb cache 7200RPM drive.
*Note I did have problems dealing with the fact that you need a freakin floppy disk to load the Serial ATA drivers when you install a fresh copy of Windows, can’t use a CD or USB drive, so I had to dig one out of my parts bin, goto Wallyworld and buy some disks, turns out 6out of the 10 disks I bought were bad out of the box, and then load start loading Windows. Of course, I was stupid and left my firewall off for 10 minutes while I was downloading patches and firewall software
:smack: :smack: :smack: and was promtly infected by numerous viruses and spyware during that brief period. I think I got them all clean out now.
Thanks for the advice. I’ve found a Maxtor 200GB SATA drive for $135, so i might give that a go.
If anyone’s still reading this thread, i also have a question about external drives. I was thinking about getting an external drive so that my wife and i could back up the really important information from both our computers on a single dirve, which could then be kept separate from our computers. We’re both grad students working on our dissertations, and it’s good to have backups of all our research notes, writing, etc.
I’ve read that it is possible to make a good external hard drive by putting an internal hard drive into an enclosure. But it seems to me that a decent enclosure costs about 50 bucks, which sort of negates the benefit, and that it is about as cheap nowdays to buy an external USB2.0 hard drive.
Because most of our data is in text form, along with a bunch of pdf files, we wouldn’t need a massive external drive. 40GB would be more than enough, and an 80B drive would allow us to back up a bunch of other stuff like digital photos as well.
Anyone have any experience with external drives, or with internal drives plus enclosures?
RandomLetters is right on the money with his post, I think. One thing you may think about is the fact that they never send cables and screws with the drives (although you should be able to order a cable when you order the drive). If you have a computer upgrade place near you, you should be able to pick up the cable if you need it as well as some mounting screws for cheap, they order them in bulk. Or you can scavenge some screws from your other hard drive, CD-ROM drive … pretty much everything in my PC is held in by one screw by now.
RandomLetters, out of personal curiousity, do the SATA cables ever have 2 connections? Or do you only ever use one SATA drive per connection?
You can only have one SATA device per SATA channel, at least in this point in time,. Maybe in a few years they will develop master and slave SATA technology.
And i second the recomendation to get a Hitachi. They are cheaper than Maxtor, WD, and Seagate, and if you look at places like toms’s Hardware guide, they also outperform them.
Just wanted to add a recommendation from my own experience: Avoid Western Digital. I had one die on me for no apparent reason, while the Maxtor that came with my computer has never had a problem and is going on six years old.
I’ve been using a couple of Maxtor external hard drives at work. I’ve been happy with them, as they’re quiet and reasonably fast. Figure about a dollar a gigabyte, although the larger ones are cheaper per gigabyte than the smaller ones.
You might almost want to get two external hard drives; back up everything to one drive and take it offsite (say to a bank safe deposit box). Then in a week or a month, back up everything again to the second drive and swap with the one off-site. If you really want to be secure, you want more than one backup, and you want the backup to be stored offsite.
If you are already using one SATA, then the easiest route is to buy another SATA drive. They don’t cost any more now, the only additional matter is a $5 cable. The reason is that many motherboards automatically attempt to boot off the first IDE device they find, before booting off any SATA device. And OEM boards tend to have lousy BIOS versions for proprietary setups, that don’t have all the features that retail ones usually have.
My only other suggestion is to look around online for reviews or owner reports of how quiet the drive you are considering is. Granted your computer may not be silent as it is, but if you choose a brand and then discover lots of user reports of that drive model whining loudly, you’ll be glad you could learn from someone else’s mistakes instead of making them yourself. I have a 60-gig IDE drive that I only used a couple months, just because after a month of totally-silent operation it started whining so loud… and I don’t think it has a lot to do with brands so much. Every hard-drive company has had good and bad models. You need to settle on one particular model, and search for information just on that one model.
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FWIW, I’ve been evaluating hard drives to replace my primary drive because I’ve been getting warning messages from the drive’s SMART system. The current drive is a Maxtor. It had a one-year warranty and, yep, on month 13, the problem started. I’ve read that Maxtor has been having these kinds of issues of late. I’m going with a Seagate as a replacement because it will have a five year warranty.
I have the same computer and added a secondary drive (IDE) from my last computer. The system didn’t recognize it at first, but after a second reboot, there it was.
It’s a Maxtor 120GB.
Dell’s case design leaves much to be desired. I don’t care for the hinged design.
Otherwise, I had no problems. It took about 15 minutes.
Most of the OEM or plain box drives I’ve seen have no manufacturers warranty whatsoever, and if you’re lucky the place where you bought it will give you 90 days. Sometimes they’re even refurbished.
I just had a year old Western Digital fail on me, I punched the serial number into their website, and found it still had two years on the warranty. I had an RMA# in seconds, and the drive arrived today, less than a week later. I haven’t even returned the old drive yet, they give you a couple weeks to do so, and you can return in the box they shipped the replacement in.
I use a 40 gig external FireWire drive called a FireLite SmartDisk. It is incredibly small and thin, very transportable. It is roughly the length of a pack of 100mm cigarettes, the same width but thinner. It was $ 150, and worth it. I back up all files, and data and have room to spare. I may install Mac OS-x Jaguar into it, and carry it as a true backup HD.
Actually, this is a situation were buying the external enclosure and a pair of internal drives makes sense - you just keep the encosure at home, and swap the hard drives every week or so, keeping one of them at an off site area.
