BleepingComputer.com: Adding a second hard disk drive

My current hard drive is 38 GB and RAM is about 1GB + 256 MB. I am wish to add a second hard disk drive to my Dell Dimension 2400 PC, which is about 8 years old and runs Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 3. I'd be most grateful for your kind suggestions on where to get a suitable hard drive and help and advice on installing it in my PC. Thanks for your kind consideration and help.

This post has been edited by hamluis: 07 December 2010 - 01:19 PM
Reason for edit: Moved from DOS/PDA to Internal Hardware ~ Hamluis.

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According to Dell your case only has one space to mount an internal hard drive which is used by youe current system drive. The drive type is IDE (either 100 or 133 will work). Since the main drive is so old and you only have one slot to mount an internal drive I would recommend replacing the old drive completely. Without knowing your budget I can't recommend a size but the largest IDE I have found recently is a 500GB. You can use imaging software to transfer all of your existing files over to the new drive.

Another alternative would be to use an external hdd.

I would get an external enclosure or IDE/SATA USB converter/adapter (available on newegg.com) to use a 1 or 2 terabyte SATA drive with, this could be used for storage/backup for your current PC, as well as a future PC which I recommend buying next year sometime after the new intel processors are released.

alternatively, baltboy's suggestion (replacement w/ a bigger, better PATA drive) is a good one considering your current drive is likely near the end of its life. also if you eventually found a used PC better than your current one, this newer IDE could be installed into that too!

This post has been edited by yorkred: 08 December 2010 - 05:22 PM

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/FmujSrN0BLIDNc7pmKBsKYD

Thank you for your kind help.

Your motherboard has 2 IDE Ports. So this is what you do:

1) Set the drive you have in there currently as Primary Master using the jumper on the hard drive.

2) Set the new drive you want as secondary Slave using the jumper.

3) Set the cd-rom as Master on the second hard drive IDE port.



In the picture above your hard drives will be connected to the white IDE Slot using a 80 pin cable. Your CD-ROM should be connected to the Black one.

You can remove your floppy drive if you do not use it, and use that slot for your second hard drive. That is another option as opposed to getting an external enclosure. You could then get an external USB Floppy if needed.

This post has been edited by cryptodan: 11 December 2010 - 03:45 AM

Thank you very much for your most kind and detailed help. These instructions really help me take a further interest in the PC. Thank you again.