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Inspiron 620 - Adding a second hard drive (UK)
Hi,
I'd like to add a second hard drive to this machine (bought in 2012). There's a spare slot in the drive bay and spare mounting rails, there's an unused connector on the power cable (P5), so it's just an additional SATA data connection that's missing.
So should I buy an additional cable to plug into a spare SATA socket on the motherboard (I think there are 4 sockets), and if so, which motherboard socket should I use? Or would it be better to replace the existing SATA cable with one that has two connectors on it? Cable recommendations would be appreciated :-).
And how will I tell the machine which of the two hard drives is the master and which is the slave?
Thanks in advance,
Mark
speedstep
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9 Legend
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October 22nd, 2015 10:00
Master and Slave are IDE Terminology the answer is NONE.
Sata uses ports numbered 0 to 4The blue port is 0 which the boot drive goes to. The next black port is 1 which is where the boot dvd goes.
The white port is 2 where 2nd hard drive goes and the last black part is 3 where the next optical drive would go.
Mary G
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October 22nd, 2015 11:00
Service manual is here and that shows the board and identifies slots in Technical Overview-
http://downloads.dell.com/Manuals/Common/inspiron-620s_service%20manual_en-us.pdf-
SATA drives don't have slave-master settings. The main drive uses sata port 0. You might have to enable the extra sata port in the bios. Those are usually off if there is nothing connected. Sata cables are cheap. Be sure to buy the correct length cable.
mw1927
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October 22nd, 2015 11:00
Thanks very much to you and Mary G: I'll buy the relevant bits.