Saturday, May 1, 2010

The fastest way to over come the storage problems is a second hard drive, in addition, its great method to protect critical data. It’s not only an easy and quick way as well as it’s a cost effective, approximately 1$ per gigabyte. So if you need additional storage on your machine, this article will tell you the simplest way to push you forward towards living this experience and obtain your desired results.
Instructions to follow:
As long as you reached this part, this means that you are about to begin this exciting process, shall we delve?
  • Hard DriveFirst check if you want the Serial ATA or IDE (parallel-ATA). Although older machines have the IDE (Parallel ATA), modern ones might support only (Serial-ATA). To make sure of that, you can open up the case and try to distinguish the used drives type. Usually the IDE drives have a flat and wide ribbon cable. The SATA ones have thinner cables and no jumpers.
  • Free a room for an extra hard drive:
  • Restart your machine then log into the BIOS-Menu.
  • Hit the Standard CMOS Settings.
  • Restart your machine
  • See a trusted manufacturer to get the external hard drive you want to add , make sure that its compatible with your master hard drive
  • Turn off your machine, unplug all cords attached to it from the back and unscrew all the screws of your case.
  • Place the screws in a well know place then remove the side panel and drag it out of the case.
  • Look for the region where all flat ribbon cables (or even the SATA cables) attach to the mother board.
  • Pose the jumpers to change the drive status to a slave or a master. Follow the instructions printed on your hard drive to do so. Meanwhile you won’t have to do so if you were dealing with a SATA, as each SATA device uses only its own cable, IDEs can share devices.
  • Locate the empty bay inside your machine case.
  • Connect the ribbon cable that to your hard drive.
  • Connect the Molex power cable; you can distinguish it by the 3 thin internal wires of red, yellow, and black. Notice that SATA drive has a non similar kind of power cable.
  • Place the side panel where it was to your computer then screw it back.
  • If you reached here it’s the last step as you will have to plug all of cables, connect them back to their power source incase while installing the drive you unplugged them.
  • Now we need the computer organization to feel all the changes, and that’s why you will restart your machine. Log into BIOS startup (depending on your mother board manufacturer you can show it by either pressing F10 or DEL key on keyboard). Now check back the BIOS Auto-Detect to make sure that the additional drive got detected. Check the screen that presents the both the Primary and Slave drives, you should see the name of the new added one.
  • Once you log into it, you will face 4 settings named as following: PRIMARY MASTER\AUTOPRIMARY SLAVE\ SECONDARY MASTER\ SECONDARY SLAVE. Hit them all and change them into Auto-Detection.