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Advice on purchasing/installing new hard drive

Hi guys,

I need some advice regarding installing a new hard drive in a desktop pc.

It's actually a friend's PC which he's bringing over this evening, so I don't know any of the spec yet. Basically, he only has a 15Gb hard drive at present, and wants to upgrade it as much as possible (within his budget obviously). Is there anything I should watch out for when selecting the new hard drive?

I should be able to post details of the machine later on if necessary.

Any help/tips/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
SWD

weblinktechnologies

If he is upgrading to a new HDD, you/he can use DriveCopy (I think it may be called DriveImage now) made by PowerQuest. It will take everything off his old drive and put it on his new perfectly. This would definitely simply restoring the o/s.

Then if you want additional storage, make the old HDD a slave. You can use it for backing up your data to another device.

In regards to HDDs, everyone has there preference. But, I have had great success with Western Digital HDD. Try sticking to this brand.

SurreyWebDesigner

ASKER

So is there anything else I should look out for? Are there different types of connections? - it's been a while since i had to purchase a new hdd.

Cheers

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bacar

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smiffy13

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SurreyWebDesigner

ASKER

cool - i'd planned on doing a fresh install (he tells me it's desperately in need of it!) ...

Once I find out the make and model of the motherboard, how do I find out what it can handle?

smiffy13

The manufacturer site may have this information. Sometimes the bios updates say that they will increase the acceptable HDD capacity. Sorry if it's a bit vague, unfortunately manufacturers don't always advertise their products limitations.

davidis99

Among the considerations when purchasing an additional hard drive is the operating system being used on the PC. If the system is running Windows 98 or ME, the only file system option is FAT32, which does support large hard drives, but very inefficiently, and in the case of hard drives over 60GB, requires a special version of FDISK downloaded from Microsoft in order to correctly create partitions on the drive. If the PC is running Windows 2000 and has a standard motherboard from that vintage, anything up to 120GB should work fine, especially if formatted NTFS.

SurreyWebDesigner

ASKER

Its running XP - I take it that will be ok?

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orubassman777

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nobus

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Robberbaron (robr)

Also, consider using Western Digital DataLifeguard11 or Maxtor MaxBlast3 to clone the existing drive. Assuming you want to upgrade C drive, not just add D. I would do the latter if possible and just re-install some games to D or move your music to it. They are generally the ones taking up the space. Then if you upgrade PC's later, you move the D drive to the new one.

The drive limitation will be based on your mainboard, so check latest BIOS for it.

Note that some diskdrives have jumpers to allow them to be used on older systems. You just waste the bit above 32Gb i think.

SurreyWebDesigner

ASKER

Cheers for all your help guys - he's actually decided to buy a new PC after all that!!!!

Oh well - handy stuff to know anyway!

Cheers
SWD