Additional Harddrive

[mflanagan]

Hello,

The day has finally arrived. My 80G WD800JD OEM HDD is full. I pull the cover off my Dell desktop and confirm that there is another slot available for an additional drive. Should I add an identical drive, or does it matter? What is the short unused cable coming off the existing HDD? Is this some sort of jumper to connect a second HD?

Thanks.

 

[Supermuncher85]

I take it is a sata drive, so the good news is you should be able to use pretty much any and all drives that are on the market right now. The only limiting factor might be your operating system and specifically 2+tb drives. So to be on the safe side, buy something < 2tb in size and it should work.

The cable at the back of your old harddrive should look like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119229

 

[Supermuncher85]

Forgot to answer some questions: The short unused cable should be power cable, where you connect the new harddrive to + the sata cable.

Sata devices usually don't have jumpers anymore unlike their older PATA cousins. So you probably won't need to worry about that.

No I would not buy the same size, since for little more you can buy say a 500gb harddrive.

 

[mflanagan]

Thanks kindly.