Adding a second hard drive

Question

Hi guys,

I just bought a Dim 4700 with a 40GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM).

I would like to add a second hard drive. I was going to put the hard drive that was in my last computer - a 80gb IDE western digital into the second bay of the new 4700.

when I took out the western hard drive I noticed that it had a wide , flat , ribbon cable(IDE?) cable connecting the 2 drives in my old computer.

When I went to put it into the new 4700 I noticed that there was a much smaller cable(Serial?) cable conneting the 40 gb hard drive that was already in there.

My question is -

Is there any way to connect the 40 gig Serial ATA HD and the 80gb WD IDE to give me 2 drives in the 4700 or do I need some sort of adapter? Do I need to buy a new compatable hard drive?

Believe it or not I am actually not too bad with computers but messing with hard drives isn't really my thing,

Thanks for any help!

ejn63 · Answer

If you have only one optical drive in the system, you can use a dual drive EIDE cable to connect the drive as master or slave to that device.

If you have two CD/DVD drives, you'll need a PCI EIDE controller or a SATA to EIDE converter.

shesagordie · Answer

Dudetheman.

The D4700 motherboard has only one IDE connector for two IDE devices, if you have two IDE devices already installed and there's a spare PCI slot, then you could buy a IDE PCI controller card [cost $30-$50] that has two IDE ports, allowing you to install four more IDE drives. You could also, buy a converter kit to convert IDE drive to SATA.
Personally I would prefer to use the PCI controller card, but if you don't have a spare PCI slot, then you will have use the convertor.

http://www.addonics.com/products/io/ide_sata.asp

Bev.

Storage, Drives & Media

Adding a second hard drive

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