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theheadgamester

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Hard Drive for my comp

When I bought my computer last summer with my summer job money, I thought that a 20GB hard drive would be more than enough.  Well, I proved myself wrong because it is already half full and every month it seems that I get close to 100 more MB on my hard drive from music files, games, and documents that I want to keep on my computer.

I need to know where I should come about getting a new hard drive (like at least a 40GB one) and how much I can expect to pay for it.  I would also need to know how to install the hard drive, and make it so I could save all of my space-hungry files to that hard drive, and not my C drive.

Thanks a lot guys/gals,
Shawn
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jlauster

For a good price on a 40 GB 7200RPM drive see:

http://www.tcwo.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_prod.html?p_prodid=17&sid=1gi2Ty0W35Jr1O2

In most instances, you can download the drive installation directions and software from the manufacturer's website. IBM is very good about this, as is Western Digital, though I trust the reliability of the IBM drives more.

Unless you buy a retail unit, you will need an 80 conductor ATA cable and possibly an ATA-100 controller card (if your motherboard does not support ATA-100) to see the full speed of the drive. Otherwise it will slow to the best speed your motherboard will support.

maybe i am just too frugal to be filling a hard drive with stuff, but as to you music files, data files, anything that is not a program, why not get a CD Burner, and save that stuff to CD... I imagine that the MP3's or whatever format you have the music in... may be the big dog of space hogs on your system

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yeah my parents have a cd burner, but they won't let me put it on my computer....they don't even use the thing...
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slink9

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Yes, CDRW seems to be a better idea... thank you slink9 and oldgreyguy.  I will give the points to slink9 because his CDRW post was informative.  Once again, thank you.