Hard drive install question

[StangFlyer]

Joe - The floppy drive has it's own controller, which is separate from the hard drive controller. The HD controller has two channels and supports up to four drives. The Flopper controller only can attach to floppy drives (and some other types of devices designed to use it like some tape backup drives). The ZIP drive should be an IDE device, so it's most likely using one of your four possible devices on your HD controller though. You might be in trouble because you listed:

DVD-ROM
CD-RW
ZIP
and your existing Hard Drive

That's four right there, so you might not be able to use your motherboard controller. Well, unless you want to nix the ZIP drive or something. If that's the case, and you want to keep everything, you may have to purchase a secondary ATA (EIDE) hard drive controller PCI card. If you do, they aren't that expensive, so get an ATA-133 capable card. Then, when you buy your new drive, make sure to get an ATA-133 7200 RPM (or better, they now make 10,000 RPM EIDE drives I think!) and hook it to the controller PCI card. That would also allow you to add up to ANOTHER 3 drives besides the new one you want to get now. This is what I had to do when I added a second 100 GB hard drive to my Compaq because it had all the drives you just listed already too.