60-Minute Upgrades

Maximum Storage: Gigabytes Are Cheap

When did your 25GB hard drive run out of room? After you digitized your LP collection? Or when your office desktop evolved into an editing console for training videos? Whatever the reason may be, that once-capacious drive is ready for a "No Vacancy" sign.

The solution is to get a 100GB or larger hard drive. Like some other PC technologies, disk storage is an overachiever, and its cost per gigabyte continues to march southward. At press time, we could fairly easily find 160GB hard drives priced at about $1 per gigabyte. If you're pinched for room, now is the perfect time to triple or quadruple your storage at minimal cost.

Rather than replacing your existing hard drive, consider installing a second, larger disk and keeping the original for additional storage or for backup. (If you plan to maintain more than two parallel ATA hard drives on your PC, you'll probably have to add another drive controller. Your system will support a second drive if you attach it to the second connector on your drive's data cable.) Your PC will likely boot and load programs faster with the new hard drive because (all things being equal) newer drives perform better. Aside from other improvements, most of today's mainstream hard drives operate at 7200 rpm, compared with the 5400-rpm mainstream drives of the recent past.

Most hard-drive vendors--including Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital--provide a software utility for imaging the contents of the original disk onto the new one--as long as you buy one of the company's hard-drive kits. A bare drive usually costs less, but you'll have to purchase a separate utility, such as PowerQuest's $70 Drive Image, to get this job done. You'll also have to make do with scanty documentation or limited step-by-step instructions.

To permit transfers between drives, both disks must be installed simultaneously. Your computer must have a spare 3.5-inch drive bay. If you have only a 5.25-inch drive bay available--usually intended for an optical drive--you can purchase a 3.5-inch mounting kit at a computer store for $5 to $10. (For a few hints on installing a drive with such a kit, see Step-By-Step.)

If your system is at least two years old, check with your PC or motherboard maker to see if your PC supports 137GB or bigger drives; many do not. You may need to update the BIOS, download an operating system service pack and/or a utility from the drive vendor's site, or use a controller card that enables your PC to recognize the larger drive. Since our new drive, the $150 Western Digital Caviar 120GB, was smaller than 137GB, we didn't have to deal with this issue.

To install our Dell Dimension's second hard drive, we opened its case and used an available 3.5-inch drive bay. If possible, secure the drive with four screws; you may have to remove a drive cage or take off the back side of your case (check your system manual).

We installed a conventional parallel ATA hard drive, which uses a traditional flat ribbon cable to carry its data. If you buy one of the newer Serial ATA hard drives, you'll be using a much slimmer (and neater) cable. Keep in mind that to use the SATA drive you must have a very new motherboard that supports SATA, or you must buy and install a PCI SATA drive controller. (Again, see this month's Step-By-Step for more information.)

Installing a hard drive can be tricky, particularly if you use a parallel ATA cable, which has connectors for two drives. Install the master drive to the connector at the far end of the ribbon; attach the secondary (or slave) drive to the connector that's close to the middle of the cable. Connect the opposite end of the cable to the ATA interface on the motherboard or controller card. Make sure that you've properly set your jumper settings for master and slave on the appropriate hard drive (check your documentation). A Serial ATA cable connects only one device, and it is free of master/slave issues.

Most of today's PCs support the Cable Select system, in which the parallel ATA cable automatically determines the drives' master/slave configuration. To use this feature, you must set the jumpers on both the master and the slave drives to the Cable Select position. Your drive manuals should show you how to do this.

The IDE interface card in our PC had a spare IDE slot, but we used the master/slave configuration above and left the extra slot free for a future upgrade. After closing the system case and rebooting, we ran the Western Digital setup CD, including a utility that transferred the contents of our original hard drive to the new 120GB disk. We noticed slight performance improvements, such as faster boot times, and of course we could store several humongous files (including a 20GB movie) with plenty of room to spare.