It's very easy really. If you buy a new drive it will come with the cable you need (in case your case doesn't already have two EIDE cables in it). Your motherboard can support four drives. Usually purchased systems have only one hard drive and one CD/DVD ROM drive. So, you'll only have used up either one channel on your motherboard controller if they have them both hooked to the same cable, or one device on each channel if they have them on separate cables. Either way, you should have at least one left (say if you have one existing HD, a DVD rom, and a CD-RW drive or something similar). You just mount the new hard drive in the case in an available 3.5" slot and connect it to one of the two cables. Plug in an available power connector and then just set the jumper on the back of the hard drive to "CS" (for cable select). You want all your drives (HD/CD/ETC) set to "CS". Make sure the HD's are connected to the END of each cable and the CD drive(s) is at the middle connector. This makes the HD's set to MASTER and the CD/Other drives set to SLAVE automatically.
You'll probably want to have your current hard drive the "master" drive on channel 0 (it already is now). And, you'll want to put the new one as the master on channel 1. Then have your DVD/CD-ROM as the slave on channel 0. If you have another device too, have that as the slave on channel 1.
Did I make any sense to you? I don't know what your computer hardware knowledge level is and sometimes I'm not the greatest at talking at the newbie level in this area.
|