How to Add a Hard Drive to Your Com­puter in 7 Steps

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maw2214 on 3:12 AM

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1: Research your machine

PCs, like the one above, are a gen­eral pur­pose tool with many parts.

Before we start the process of adding a drive, we need to do a small amount of research inside your

machine. The goal of the research is to find out if it will be easy or not so easy to add the new hard drive. We also need to find out what kind of drive you need to buy. You may be able to do this research by read­ing through your computer’s man­u­als, but it is far eas­ier to sim­ply open the case and look inside.

The first ques­tion to answer is: How many hard disk dri­ves have already been installed inside the case? In the major­ity of machines, the answer to this ques­tion is “one.” Hav­ing only one hard disk drive installed makes it easy to install another one. After you open up your computer’s case and look inside, you will prob­a­bly find one opti­cal drive (a CD or DVD drive), a sin­gle hard disk drive and per­haps a floopy disk drive. The opti­cal and floppy dri­ves will be easy to find because you can see them on the out­side of the case. The hard drive may take a lit­tle search­ing. If you have no idea what a hard drive looks like, look at the photo above.

If there are already two dri­ves installed inside your case, then adding a new one is more difficult.

2: Check how much space is available

This cage con­tains two hard dri­ves. If the computer’s user wanted an addi­tional hard drive, he would have to add an exter­nal one.

Is there space avail­able to add another hard-disk drive? Your cur­rent hard disk is prob­a­bly mounted in a small metal cage or rack inside the machine. Make sure there is space avail­able in the cage for another drive. If not, adding an exter­nal drive is an option.

An exter­nal drive con­nects to your com­puter through either a USB 2.0 con­nec­tion or a Firewire  con­nec­tion, so your com­puter needs to have USB 2.0 or FireWire con­nec­tors. Once you buy the drive, all you have to do is con­nect it and fire up your com­puter. The drive will come with con­fig­u­ra­tion instruc­tions, but on Win­dows XP it will likely be plug-and-play. You can start sav­ing files on your new drive immediately.

There is one big advan­tage to an exter­nal drive: you can plug it into mul­ti­ple machines and move files around. You can take it with you any­where you go. The only real dis­ad­van­tage is that it will be slower than an inter­nal drive. If it takes a minute to copy a giga­byte of data on an inter­nal drive, it might take two min­utes on an exter­nal drive. That may or may not be impor­tant depend­ing on what you want to do. For most appli­ca­tions, the slower speed is irrelevant.

3: See what type of cable sys­tem is used

An IDE, or PATA hard drive, uses a wide, flat or thick cable to con­nect to the computer’s motherboard.Find out what type of cable sys­tem is used to con­nect dri­ves to the motherboard. There are two sys­tems in com­mon use: IDE dri­ves (also known as PATA, or Par­al­lel ATA), and SATA (Ser­ial ATA) dri­ves. PATA dri­ves have wide, flat cables or thick cables as wide as your fin­ger, while SATA dri­ves have thin cables about the diam­e­ter of a pen­cil. You will need to know whether to buy an IDE or SATA drive, and you should be able to tell by look­ing at the cables.

Now that you have con­firmed that there is space to install a new drive in your machine and you know what type of drive you need (PATA or SATA), you can buy a new drive.

5: Elim­i­nate sta­tic electricity

To avoid pass­ing sta­tic elec­tric­ity to your new hard drive, you can wear an inex­pen­sive ground­ing bracelet.

Before we start work­ing with the drive, we need to talk about sta­tic elec­tric­ity. Your com­puter is highly sen­si­tive to sta­tic shocks. This means that if you build up sta­tic elec­tric­ity on your body and a shock passes from your body to some­thing like a hard drive, that hard drive is dead and you will have to buy another one.

The way to elim­i­nate sta­tic elec­tric­ity is by ground­ing your­self. There are lots of ways to do this, but prob­a­bly the eas­i­est way is to wear a ground­ing bracelet on your wrist. Then you con­nect the bracelet to some­thing grounded (like a cop­per pipe or the cen­ter screw on a wall outlet’s face plate). By con­nect­ing your­self to ground, you elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­ity of sta­tic shock. You can get a bracelet for a few dollars.

6: Set the jumpers

First, set the jumpers (if it is an IDE drive). Let’s talk about this in more detail, because most peo­ple have IDE drives.

In the IDE sys­tem, most moth­er­boards allow you to have two IDE cables. Each cable can con­nect to two dri­ves. Usu­ally you use one cable to con­nect one or two opti­cal dri­ves to your machine. The other cable is used to con­nect one or two hard dri­ves to your machine.

You want both hard dri­ves to be on the same cable. The two dri­ves on the cable are called “mas­ter” and “slave.” You want your exist­ing hard drive (which con­tains the oper­at­ing sys­tem and all of your cur­rent data) to be the “mas­ter” and the new hard drive to be the “slave.” The drive should have instruc­tions on them that tell you how to set the jumpers for mas­ter and slave. So read the instruc­tions and set the jumpers. If you are using SATA dri­ves, you do not need to set jumpers for mas­ter and slave because each drive gets its own cable. Check out How IDE Con­trollers Work to learn more about the mas­ter and slave configuration.

7: Mount the drive and connect

Now that the jumpers are set cor­rectly, mount the new drive in your drive cage and screw it into place. 

Next, plug in the drive’s power con­nec­tor to the power sup­ply. If it fits, then it’s a match.

Con­nect the IDE or SATA cable to the drive.

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