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Second Hard Drive
I have a DELL Dimension 8300 with XP Pro, 4 GB RAM and a 120 GB HD that is essentialy full. I want to add a second HD, say 1 TB, and make it my primary drive, using the original 120 GB HD for backing up my photo collection.
I was told that adding a second HD of that size [1 TB] could slow down my pc. Could it? A lot? I'm not a gamer and the most of the work that I do is with Photoshop Elements, Quicken, Excel and MS Word.
Anything else I should consider or watch out for?
Any thoughts/warnings, etc?
Thanks in advance for all comments.
RChris
370 Posts
1
March 18th, 2009 22:00
Just a thought: the Dim 8300 supports both IDE and SATA drives. So, you might want to look and see which of those your existing drive is. It's my understanding that IF you mix SATA and IDE drives, the SATA has to be the boot disk (with the OS). Of course, if you get a new SATA drive and make it the primary as you intend to do, then it really doesn't matter what the existing drive is.
No, don't worry about the disk size of the new drive.
TheRealFireblad
4.6K Posts
1
March 19th, 2009 09:00
As advised, you can use any capacity hard drive in a desktop system.
Favoured brands are Samsung (their F1 is popular), Seagate (7200.11/7200.12. 5 year warranty!), and Western Digital (Caviar: Green, Blue, Black).
Install the new drive as the primary drive, and your 120GB as a slave drive - in the BIOS.
Assuming the old one is also a SATA drive, you don't have to mess around with jumpers.
But since it's going to be used for backups, you might want to consider sticking the 120GB drive in an external enclosure :emotion-55:
You can get enclosures which accept both IDE and SATA drives, so it wouldn't matter which of the two it is.
If your budget allows, get one which supports eSATA - as well as USB 2.0.
They're only a few bucks more expensive, but the difference eSATA makes to backup speeds - particularly to copying/moving larger files, is phenomenal!
Check to see if the enclosure is supplied with an eSATA cable? If it isn't, and you don't have one, you'll need to order one.
That assumes the Dimension 8300 has an external SATA port in the first place of course?
If it doesn't, you'll either have to settle for using USB 2.0... or buy an eSATA PCI Card.
If you backup a lot of files - on a regular basis, it would be a very worthwhile investment (IMO), for the time it can save.
The added benefit of using an external enclosure of course, is that you can swap out the hard drive for another quickly and easily, when the one you're using is full.
And you can do it without the need to shut down/open up your system :emotion-21:
rcaastro
57 Posts
0
April 21st, 2009 13:00
Sorry for the delay in answering this but we had some family problems and I was overtaken by events.
Incidentally, 4 different opinions I received from tech support types said the max was 200, 500, 500, and 1 TB!
Go figure.
Thank you very much for answering my request.