Well your HD is SATA not sure if SATA 2 or SATA 1 but either will work.  Best to get SATA 2 drivers with faster trasfer rate but in all reality does not make much difference.

 

Your CD Drives may have been IDE.   On my XPS 410 it does not even have the old IDE connector any more.    Has 6 SATA ports.

 

Not sure but your XPS 400 may have had 4 SATA and 1 IDE connector that supports 2 drives.   Check you owner manual to make sure.

 

 

XPS400 2.8Gig 820 D Dual Core -VIIV
O/S WinXP Media Center Edition 2005
2G.B. DDR2 RAM 533MHZ-4x512M.B.
Hard Drive 250G.B. 7200RPM
ATI 128M.B.HYPER Mem PCI-E X16 X300SE.DIM
ATI TV Wonder Elite PCI
19" FP
Sigma-Tel Intergrated Audio 7.1 channel
Logitech G15 Keyboard
DVD-/+RW & DVD-ROM
Pertelian X2040 ForeSight Systems LCD information Display
Dell 944 AIO Printer

 

 

     Hi Tom

          Thanks for hte information ,I appreciate your taking the time ! Its about time for me to open my tower and blow the dust out of it and clean the fans etc. I try to do this aprx every three months or so with both my PC's ,my old P3 and the new Dell XPS400 ! My kids use the old PC ,and the XPS is my new toy ! Iam sure once I see what the cable connecting the H.D. to the M.B. it will validate the information to me just by no longer seeeing the flat IDE cable my P3 has !

                                                                           Take Care ,Nick 

Dear Gumba

Your hard drive is a SATA II i know i have the same system and that is what i see on the cable and in my configeration.. i am also in the process of installing another hard drive a bigger one so i can save my grandkids pictures on it then i am creating a slide show of all the pictures from their birth to they graduate i know that is alot of pics since they are only 4 years old and 2 years old. But i think it will be funny when they get older to see a video slide show of themselves ... Who knows it may be a life of their graduation party lol lol if you get what i mean.. But anyways when you get your dew hard drive make sure you also by this cable you will have to call technical support for the xps the part number is this T9219 not sure if one end is a right angle or not mine has not got here yet.. Still waiting for it to arrive. Because the cable does not come with the hard drives.. As for the power to the hard drive there is an extra power supply cord that comes out from your original hard drive in your computer it is marked i think P5 it is the white one i believe that will be your extra power cord and that is the one that you will use for your new hard drive as for your serial ATA data cord you can plug that in anywhere where the serial data cable there should be 3 remaining spots to plug it in you will see when you open up your case check out where your original hard drive serial cable is plugged on the mother board and you will see 3 more slots to plug into that is where you plug the new hard drive at ... I hope this helps.. I havent installed my new hard drive  yet still waiting for the cable to arrive but i plan on doing it this weekend since i am off this weekend.. as for anything else it will be a trial and error since i havent done this in awhile they say all i have to do is put in hard drive plug power cable in then plug serial data cable in from hard drive to mother board and then turn on computer and the computer will assign a new drive letter for that new hard drive... I hope that is the case... if not well at least ill have my other drive to still connect lol lol ... and work on the other.. Will See.. Catch ya later.

 

well i got my new hard drive installed it works fine, but i had a few hurdles to go through first.  After i installed the hard drive i had to go through a few times into F2 i think it is setup and go down to drives to set it up and once i got the right sata drive that recognized the drive i was on my way then i would reboot after that i had to format the new hard drive so it would give the accurate amount on hard drive to do that i went to my computer right clicked on that then click on manage then it brought a box up called computer management then i clicked on the + sign that said Disk Management then i had to right click on the new hard drive after i assigned a number to it to format it and it is working fine but the only thing i dont understand is that this hard drive is a 200 gb it should say 200 gb as for free space since there is nothing on it but it dont it says it has 186.24 free space which makes no sense to me Does anyone know why it does that there is nothing nada not operating system files or anything on it ... i called tech support and they say that is the way hard drives run... Go Figure

 but anyways its up and running

Just thought you should know ...