Upgrade an existing hard drive or installing a new one?
Some points on how to install your storage. New or replacement, IDE or SATA
there are some things you need to be aware of when purchasing and then putting
the new drive in to your computer.
The newer hard drives are SATA format and the older drives are IDE. Before
you buy you new hard drive you will need to know which interface format your
computer supports, if your computer is IDE and you buy a SATA drive it may
force you to either return it or buy an interface card to access the storage.
There are some ways to identify your current interface, software, physically,
or your manufactures hand book.
Software that will identify your hard drive interface:
With the Systems Manager, select device manager, then look at the IDE ATA/ATAPI
controllers. This will tell you what controllers are installed in the computer,
it will not tell you the type of drives that are connected to which controller.
My system shows two SATA interface controllers and seven IDE channel interfaces,
although I can only intstall four IDE devices (two DVD drives and two IDE hard
drives).
With a search of the internet I only found one utility that would identify
hard drives with out opening the case and doing a physical check.
So visual check is your best choice.
This is what a IDE drive will look like, note the wide cable with three
connectors, the blue connector is connected to the motherboard interface, the
black connector would be connected to the Master drive and the grey to the
slave drive. On proprietary systems the jumpers would be set as the hard drive
is master and the CD/DVD drive would be the slave. On custom built systems you
may have two cables, one for the hard drive and one for the CD/DVD in this case
the jumpers would be set for Cable Select ( CS )
Note: If the cable does not have the key protrusion on
the top of the cable, this is normal. If you look at the your cable and
the key is missing you can identify which way the cable is inserted in to
the connector either by the missing pin having a filler in the pin hole
or the two small grooves on end of the top of the cable.
A - Grooves
B - Key
C - Jumpers
This is what a SATA drive will look like, note the thin cable, at this time
the primary color is red, there are however blue cables available, there is no
difference in the actual cable just the color. Also note that there are only
two connectors one goes to the motherboard interface the other to the drive.
Also note the power connector is different from the older style connectors, it
is flat and very wide.
A - SATA Power Connector
B - SATA Interface Connector
Jumpers:
The SATA drive jumpers are not for the drive selection. The interface will
control the function of the drive, that is your SATA interface may or may not
have a RAID facility built in to it. If the interface does not have a RAID
facility then each channel will only be able to support two SATA drives. If
you have a RAID facility then each channel will support from four to eight SATA
drives. (See my page on
configuring RAID Arrays).
IDE drives have a set of jumpers that allow you to set the function of the
drive, the functions are Master, Slave, and Cable Select (M, S, and CS).
When
you install two IDE drives in a computer and use the same cable to connect them
to the IDE interface (it can be on the motherboard or an add on card) you have
to tell the interface which drive will be accessed first when the system
initializes (or starts up). You can use the CS facility for most drives of the
same manufacture, such as two Seagate drives or two Western Digital drives. If
you mix the drives then the CS function may fail. I would suggest if your are
mixing brands of drives to use the master / slave jumpers. Normally there will
be a chart on top of the drive showing the jumper settings, or in the E-Book
that comes with the drive. If this is a used drive and doesn't have the
settings on the placard you will have to go to the manufactures web site and
find the jumper settings, normally in the support section of the web site.
Note: The slave jumper may be a vertical position also.
Another function of the master / slave jumpers is to set the 'boot' drive
when you have two hard drives or two CD/DVD drives using the same cable. If you
use the CS and one of the drives has the OS installation on it you may have an
intermittent 'Operating System not found' or 'Missing Operating System' errors.
Mounting the drive in your computer.
Mounting the drive can be difficult because of space restraints. The main
things is to mount the drive with space around it for air flow and to not mount
the drive so that it is at an angle. Always try to place the drive so that the
platters are spinning horizontal, or vertical. Never at anything over 180* or
less than 90*.
External drives -
External drives come in different sizes and shapes and connect in different
ways. There is the extremely small, to the array of drives. Depending on your
requirements you can have a 4 meg pen drive (USB) to a 300 Tetra Byte Array
that would fill up half your garage. Normally we would think of an external
drive as being about 2.5 inches wide and one half inch thick for a very small
drive, and four inches wide by one inch thick for a large drive. These drives
are very common and are used for backup or extra storage. Most are USB drives
although there are still some FireWire and of course the larger Array drives
will be SCSI.
The only thing you would be concerned with if you were to build your own
external drive is if you wanted to use a IDE drive in the case. You would want
to set the jumper to CS, not master or slave.
This site contains a lot of information. As
with any publication not all information is available due to space, time, or
subject constraints.
If you have a question that you did not find the answer
on this web site you a can
ask your question here and we will endeavor to get you the most up to date
answer possible!
