Add a Second Hard Drive
Adding a second hard drive to a computer system is an easy way to get around storage problems, and also a good way to protect valuable data. With the cost of hard drives dropping well below $1 per gigabyte, it makes good financial sense to increase storage capacity by adding a second drive. But what kind of drive? And are they easy to install? Read on for buying tips and installation help...

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Preparing for a New Hard Drive

First, determine whether the computer system has room for an additional hard drive. Following the instructions in your computer's operations manual, open the computer case and find the hard drive. (It will probably be about an inch high, three and a half inches wide, and about five or six inches long, with two connectors plugged into it.) If there is room above or below that hard drive for another device the same size, you probably have room for a second hard drive.
IDE or SATA?
Next, look at the cables attached to the existing drive. One will be a power connector and the other will be a data connector. The power connector routes to the computer's power supply and the data connector routes to the motherboard. If the data connector is wide (about two inches), this is an IDE drive, and you will need to get a second IDE drive. Also, check to see if there is available space to plug in a second drive on the same ribbon cable. If not, you will need to install a second ribbon cable in the second drive controller slot on the motherboard, assuming it's available. (The cable should come with the drive.)

If the data connector is small (less than an inch wide), you have a newer SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drive, and will need to purchase another SATA drive. You should have plenty of space available on the motherboard to add another SATA drive, as most motherboards that support SATA have at least four SATA connectors.

Megabytes or Gigabytes?
The storage capacity of the Hard drives of yesteryear were measured in megabytes, and one megabyte (MB) is about one million characters. There was a time when hard drives cost about $10 per MB, and they were about the size of a small toaster.
Today, hard drives are much smaller and much cheaper. You can buy one gigabyte (1GB = 1000MB) of storage for under a buck, and they're just a little bigger than a calculator.
So live large! I recommend you go for at least 80GB, or larger if it fits your budget. But check your computer's manual to see if it can handle a monster drive before you buy.
Installing Your Hard Drive
If you are installing an IDE drive, on the same cable as the original drive, set the new drive's jumper (the small plastic connector on the set of pins by the data connection) to the Slave setting. If you're installing an IDE drive on a second ribbon cable, and it's the only device on that cable, use the Master setting. If you have a CDROM drive attached to the secondary IDE connector, make the new hard drive Master and the CDROM Slave, setting the jumpers on each device accordingly. The position of the pins for the Master or Slave setting may vary from one drive to another, so refer to the documention that came with the drive.

Most importantly, before you mount the drive in the computer, look on the printed circuit board on the bottom of the drive to find which pin of the data connection is pin 1. It will be labeled with either a "1" or a solid white triangle. This information may also be stamped into the drive case near the connector. The ribbon cable will have a speckled red edge, and this edge MUST correspond to Pin 1 on the data connector, or the computer will not recognize your new drive.
With a SATA drive, the process is much easier. Simply plug the power connector into the drive, and connect the drive to the motherboard SATA controller using the supplied SATA cable. (Both connectors are both keyed to prevent improper connection.) With SATA drives, there is no need to change jumper settings, though you may need to update your computer's BIOS if it can't see the drive.

External Drives

If messing with motherboards is not your style, you can get an external hard drive that connects easily to your computer with a USB cable. External drives are a bit more expensive, but the easy setup and the fact that it's portable make it a good choice for some. The Iomega 33xxx series and the Maxtor OneTouch get high marks from reviewers and users, but other manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital make good products as well. Look for a drive that supports a USB 2.0 connection, or the faster FireWire hookup if your system supports it
Copying Your Data
Chances are, your new drive will be larger and faster than the old drive. If so, you may want to copy the contents of the old drive to the new one, and keep the old drive as additional storage. You may also opt to leave just the operating system files on the old drive and keep all user data on the new one.
For help copying your old drive to the new drive, see my article Copying Old Hard Drive to New PC.
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Posted by Bob Rankin on January 17, 2006 10:41 AM
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Article information: AskBobRankin -- Add a Second Hard Drive (Posted: January 17, 2006 10:41 AM)
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Most recent comments on "Add a Second Hard Drive"
(See all 119 comments for this article.)Posted by:
JG
27 May 2009
I installed a third hard drive into my computer and the only free slots were neighboring other hard drives. Is there any danger in mounting two hard drives right alongside each other?
EDITOR'S NOTE: Should not be a problem. If a drive bay is open, you can use it.
Posted by:
Henry
27 May 2009
My computer has both IDE and SATA motherboard plug-ins. (sorry, I do not know the proper term) I have a 100gb IDE drive installed. I want to add a second hard drive. A new SATA 1tb as a slave drive. My motherboard DOES have 2 SATA slots that I can plug in my new SATA drive to.
1. Will the above set-up work as IDE master and SATA slave, or will using both an IDE drive and a SATA drive create problems?
2. If above would not work well, I see that they sell adaptors that snap onto the SATA drive that would convert my SATA drive plugs to the older IDE data and power plugs. (It would cost about $20) Would this work better than #1 configuration? Would I loose speed on my now converted SATA drive?
EDITOR'S NOTE: Should not be a problem to connect both an IDE and a SATA. If your computer is lacking SATA drivers, you can use the adapter to connect it as IDE. I don't know if there will be a speed degradarion, sorry.
Posted by:
L van Breemen
04 Jun 2009
The tip about master/slave setting harddisk and dvd-writer is spot on! Thanks!!! Now it works
Posted by:
Val
19 Jun 2009
I Installed second 1TB SATA HD and formated it (Win XP: Control Panel=Performance and Maintenance=Administrative Tools=Computer Management=Disk Management=...)New HD works OK,but there is one problem. When PC goes ON after sleep mode,New HD is invizible and I have to restart my PC. How can I resolve this problem?
EDITOR'S NOTE: Are you saying the drive works fine when you boot up normally, but cannot be found after returning from sleep mode? Sounds like it might not be powering back on when the system wakes up. Check in BIOS to see if there are any SATA or power related settings that might help.
Posted by:
val
20 Jun 2009
Thanks for NOTE! In BIOS of course I can see second HD, becouse I have to reboot PC to go in BIOS, but I didn`t find any settings that can help.
Any idea?????
Posted by:
Robert
30 Jun 2009
Just purchased a new PC and would like to add the hard drive from my old computer. Question is this: The old hard drive has an OS on it as well as the new hard drive. If I simply hook up the second hard drive, will the new computer try to read the OS and mess up my new computer's hard drive. Don't know how you would have two OS going at the same time.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Your computer's BIOS tells the system which drive to boot from, usually that's the C: drive. It's not a problem to have more than one botoable drive.
Posted by:
Alan
14 Jul 2009
Hi. I've followed your article to add a 2nd hard drive (Seagate 160Gb ATA) to a Dell 4550 desktop running XP. I set the jumper to "cable select" to match the setting of the 1st drive. The DOS BIOS settings screen shows the 2nd disk as 30Mb, but the Windows' "My Computer" doesn't show the 2nd drive at all. Any idea what may cause this problem?
EDITOR'S NOTE: Is the drive formatted? Does it have existing partitions?
Posted by:
Daz Brough
18 Jul 2009
I've got a Terabyte hard drive and it works like a dream. I use it to back up my original disks and so on. My only problem was, being a bit of a novice at the insides of a cpu, Initializing the disk. Once i did that it was fine. Quite easy really isnt it! Ram last week, HDD this week. I might build a system from scratch.Is it hard to build one from scratch? I'm assuming it is, or would be for me being pretty new. Any tips?
EDITOR'S NOTE: You need a little bit of geek in you, but not much. If you've already replaced RAM and HDD, then you can do it. Check with TigerDirect or other component suppliers, and buy yourself a case, power supply, motherboard, RAM video card, drives, and maybe a modem. Talk to a salesperson to make sure they're all compatible and you can put it together with just a screwdriver. No soldering iron required!
Posted by:
Ben
07 Oct 2009
Hi there. My sata hard drive is dieing so I bought a new one. I have it up an run. My prob is I connected up my old sata hard drive to get info off it but my windows xp is not picking it up. What do I need to do? I also have a old hard drive as well it worked as a second hard drive well but i cant see my it in my computer any more?
but i see it in devise manager. thanks
Posted by:
JWC
06 Nov 2009
Bob,
If you have your two IDE HDDs connected to an 80 ribbon cable, do you set the jumpers on both to CS?