2nd hard drive

Hi,

The largest HDD that can be installed would be a 120GB since there is the limitation of 137GB with your BIOS. This level can be overcome by using an ATA 100/133 PCI Controller Card. I see that Maxtor will shortly release their 5400 RPM 320GB HDDs & 250GB 7200RPM ones.

If you want to use the included ATA Cable there should be an extra connector unless you have four IDE devices ordered.

Steve

A 5400 rpm hard drive can be a slave drive and be compatible with
the 7200 master hard drive. Right?

What's the difference between an ultra ATA hard drive and a USB 2.0 hard drive?

Why did you add a card?

Your answers will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Do yourself a favor - I added a 120G USB2.0 drive (7200rpm) and card for $200 and it works like a charm.

The USB drive would be an external drive. You would not need a USB 2.0 card with a Dimension 4500.

However you can save money with an internal drive. newegg.com sells a 120GB Western Digital drive for $161 postpaid. Its really easy to install a second internal drive. If you are familiar with the insides of a computer, it takes under 5 minutes. Dell's documentation has instructions if you aren't familiar.

When you start to worry about how you are going to back up all the data on your drives, then you might want to consider an external drive as one of the backup alternatives.

Dimension 8200, 2.2GHz, 512MB, 80+60GB, Philips DVD+RW, 1702FP, SB Live! 1024, WinXP Pro (Home system)
Dimension 4300S, 1.6GHz, 384MB, 40GB, 16x10x40x CDRW, 1702FP, integrated sound, WinXP Home. (Wife's system)
Inspiron 8200, 1.6GHz, 256MB, 30GB, WiFi, DVD, SXGA+, WinXP Home. (portable)
Dimension 4100, 1GHz, 256MB, 40GB, 12x8x32x CDRW, integrated sound, Win2K (Fathers system I maintain)
Homebrew, 1GHz, 512MB, 30GB, 12x8x32x CDRW, 32x CDROM, integrated sound, Win2K.(Work system)
(other monitors 19-21" CRT, 100BaseT networking, mundane video cards
and speakers, Microsoft&Logitech wheel mice, Northgate Omnikey and
Dell keyboards)

Hi, jaz50y,
Your idea sounds interesting. I want to add another drive for back up. Your idea sounds so easy. Could you please answer some questions for me? Is the USB 2.0 just as fast as an internal 7200 rpm drive? Where did you get your ext. drive?
Many thanks,
Jane

Hi Talny,

Thank you very much for your clear explanation!

Your consideration is appreciated.

That's about what I paid for my USB drive. You need 2.0 for the speed. You can then easily hook the drive to any other USB port in another computer to move files around as well (it is backwards compatible, just much slower with USB 1.0). The only disadvantage I see is that you can't make it a bootable drive. And of course it really is just a case with circuitry holding a regular hard drive that always could be moved to an internal mount!

I got mine at RoyalComputer.com. You should do a search at bizrate.com or pricescan.com and be careful with the lowest prices. But Royal had a good price and shipped reasonably quickly. I am not sure if it is just as fast as internal or not. My internal drive is 5400rpm, so having the 7200rpm drive is a help. Basically it is all transparent to me - i.e. I can't tell the difference.

I ordered a 2nd internal hard drive from Dell for my Dimension L 733r.(80 gig)
It came with no instructions and there was no space to put it anyway. I have a USB 2.0 port. This might be the answer for me.

Thanks,
ezgo

You could attempt to mount the 2nd hard disk in the external 3.5" Zip bay, however you'll have to run it off of the slave IDE2 connector, or purchase a new IDE1 cable that has two connects.

If you opt for the latter, measure the distance from the original hard disk to the Zip bay so that the connects will reach from the board to both drives.