Originally Posted by
SeK612
I'm planning on getting a second hard drive if possible, but I'm keen to do a bit of research before hand to clear a few things up.
An excellent idea.
Mostly my fears are due to the size of the second hard drive and whether it'll be possible to attach it to my existing system. At the moment I have a 120GB drive and would be looking to spend around £60-£80 which seems to be enough to get a 200GB-250GB drive. Would attaching a drive live this as a slave to the existing drive work o.k. My machine is a few years old now and I have heard of problems with physical limits restricting the amount of hard disk space that can be used with older machines (possibly related to motherboards?).
Assuming you have space in the tower to actually mount the new drive, installing it as a slave should pose no problems. There are limitations (which are software, not hardware) related to addressable size that are OS dependant, but I'm not very knowedgable about older OSs, so you'll need help from someone else on that.
Also general information about manufactures and drive types would be welcome. At the moment I'd be going for a IDE drive, as that seems to be the most common (and cheapest) type compared to others. I'd also go for a Hitachi drive as I understand they bought out IBM's hard drive manufacturing business and my existing drive is a IBM (plus I've heard things about some of the other manufactures, such as Maxtor drives being pretty noisy). Are these reasonable assumptions to make a purchase on.
I would recommend a Seagate drive.
In my experience they are quiet and reliable and also sport a five year warranty.
Finally would now be a good time to get a new hard drive. I've noticed that the high end of drives sold by companies seems to have shifted from 350GB - 400GB to 500 GB whilst I've been looking. This is probably just the normal advances in technology, but there’s no chance that waiting a while longer before buying would reap massive benefits is there?
Bookmarks