new hard drive installed

On Wednesday, i ordered a new hard drive and it was delivered today. Installing it was relatively straightforward but i can see how it can turn in to a nightmare if you don’t *really* know what you’re doing.

There are a few things you have to do before buying an internal hard drive;

• Check to see if your motherboard can handle it.
• See if you have the space / expansion slot for it.

You then need to order a SATA cable for the hard drive to connect it to the motherboard (most internal hard drives don’t come with SATA cables). What is SATA? Go here, but you don’t need to know what it is – if you have a modern desktop, you’ll be using SATA and will need a cable.

You’ll also need a power cable to power the hard drive – my XPS 420 came with a spare power cable and expansion slot, so happy days – for me it was simply a case of sliding the hard drive in to place, connecting the power cable to the hard drive and then connecting my new SATA cable from the hard drive to the motherboard. That’s it – from then on it’s all about the settings and configuration.

I had to enable some connections in the BIOS settings… when you boot up your PC, you can press F-something (F2 for me) to enter your BIOS settings… i switched a few things that were off to ‘on’ and eventually my drive was read.

Vista detected it automatically, but because i hadn’t assigned a letter to it, it didn’t display under ‘my computer’. So to do that, i had to right click on my computer, click ‘manage’ and then go down to storage and disk management.

From there, i right clicked on my new hard drive to initialize it… i then assigned a letter to it and that was that…. i now have an additional 596GB of free space In total, i now have over 1TB of storage available on my desktop. I doubt i’ll ever fill it, but the more the merrier 🙂

All i need now is windows 7 and then i can really start taking full advantage of this new hard drive…