How to Install a Hard Drive in your computer?

Do you own a computer that is more than a year old? If so, then you may be running out of disk space. In the same way that closets and attics have a way of filling up and overflowing, so do hard drives. Maybe your 8-megapixel camera needs a gigabyte of disk space every time you unload the camera's memory card. Or your MP3 collection grows by 10 songs every day. Perhaps you are trying to edit videos of the kids, and every 5 minutes of tape consumes a gigabyte of disk space. Or maybe you would like to add a TV tuner card to your machine and turn your computer into a DVR.

Digital cameras, video cameras, MP3 players and TV tuner cards all consume lots of disk space. If you use any of these gadgets, chances are that you need more space. In this article, we will show you how easy it is to add a new hard drive to your existing machine.

Before we start the process of adding a drive, we need to do a small amount of research inside your machine. The goal of the research is to find out if it will be easy or not so easy to add the new hard drive. We also need to find out what kind of drive you need to buy. You may be able to do this research by reading through your computer's manuals, but it is far easier to simply open the case and look inside.

The first question to answer is: How many hard disk drives have already been installed inside the case? In the majority of machines, the answer to this question is "one."

Having only one hard disk drive installed makes it easy to install another one. After you open up your computer's case and look inside, you will probably find one optical drive (a CD or DVD drive), a single hard disk drive and perhaps a floppy disk drive. The optical and floppy drives will be easy to find because you can see them on the outside of the case. The hard drive may take a little searching. If you have no idea what a hard drive looks like, look at the photo above.
If there are already two drives installed inside your case, then adding a new one is more difficult.

Is there space available to add another hard-disk drive? Your current hard disk is probably mounted in a small metal cage or rack inside the machine. Make sure there is space available in the cage for another drive. If not, look at the section on adding an external drive.

Find out what type of cable system is used to connect drives to the motherboard. There are two systems in common use: IDE drives (also known as PATA, or Parallel ATA), and SATA (Serial ATA) drives. PATA drives have wide, flat cables or thick cables as wide as your finger, while SATA drives have thin cables about the diameter of a pencil. You will need to know whether to buy an IDE or SATA drive, and you should be able to tell by looking at the cables.

An IDE, or PATA hard drive, uses a wide, flat or thick cable to connect to the computer's motherboard.

A SATA hard drive uses thin cables about the diameter of a pencil to connect to the computer's motherboard.

Now that you have confirmed that there is space to install a new drive in your machine and you know what type of drive you need (PATA or SATA), you can buy a new drive.