Upgrade computers - Installing a hard drive

With today’s prices, huge drives are a cheap upgrade to speed things up on your system. Most of the larger drives are much faster and a larger drive gives Windows more virtual RAM to work with. Installing a hard drive is fairly easy and if you follow this step by step process, you’ll be up and running in no time.

If you are replacing a bad drive or just a smaller one, you will be losing all of your data. If possible, make a backup. Then power down your computer, but leave the cord plugged in for awhile. Open the cover (there are several styles of cases today, consult your manual when in doubt). At this point I always like to touch the chassis to ensure I’m completely discharged of any static build-up. Now you can unplug the power cord from the back of the PC.

Installing a hard drive advice

Where’s the hard drive?

Though there are other locations, the most common place you’ll find a hard drive is directly under the floppy drive. There should be four screws (two on each side) which hold the drive in place. Before removing them, unplug the power connector (red and yellow wires, usually a white connector with four pins) and then unplug the ribbon cable from the back of the drive. Then remove the screws and the drive will slide out of the bay. NOTE: Some manufacturers use pretty elaborate mounting techniques that may not apply here. For example, your drive may be mounted with rails.



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Once the drive is out, check it’s jumper settings and match them on the new drive. When I say match them, I don’t mean pin for pin, as they will likely be different brands and/or models. What I mean is, if the master jumper is set and the slave present jumper is set, be sure to do that on the new drive. If just the slave jumper is set, set just the slave jumper on the new drive, etc.. Also, check to see if anything else was connected to the same ribbon cable (like a CD). If it went straight from the motherboard to the hard drive, it will be configured as a Master. If you are adding a hard drive as a second drive, you might have to change the original to “Master with slave present” and set the new drive to Slave.

Slide the new drive in and screw it in place.



Plug the power connector back in. It is keyed, so make sure you are plugging it in the correct way. See my picture below.

Installing a hard drive

Then plug in the ribbon cable, which is also keyed. The cable will have a colored strip on pin 1, this goes toward the power supply.



The final part of installing a hard drive

It’s not a bad idea to plug the power in and power up before closing the case. Most BIOS chips today will detect the new drive and configure it properly. You’re all done and it only took 15 minutes! You’ll have to format the drive before you can use it, but that’s in another article.

Thats it for my installing a hard drive article, remember to set the jumpers correctly. Thats the important part.

More Build/Upgrade articles

Installing a motherboard
Installing a cpu
Installing a cpu fan
Installing memory
Installing a graphics card
Installing a sound card
Installing a network card
Installing a hard drive
Installing floppy disk drives
Installing a cd drive