PC Upgrade

Dear all,

I wondered if someone could offer some advise.

I have the PC as layed out below and have almost filled the 120GB hard drive and will need to purchase another one.

Could someone give some advise how I can add an extra hard drive into the system. If I am able to add an additional one in do I then need to buy an uprated power unit and cooling system?

Dell Dimension 4500 2.26GHz
2.26GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor with 512K cache
512MB DDR RAM
40GB Hard Drive
120GB Hard Drive
64MB nVidia GeForce2 MX Graphics Card (TV OUT)
8X IDE CD Drive
8X IDE DVD/CDRW COMBO DRIVE
Creative Labs SB Live 1024 Voice Sound Card
Microsoft Windows XP

Thanks

 

If you get a motherboard with RAID you can install up to 4 additional drives I think, and still have your existing IDE devices, or you could just delete some of your porn!!!!!!!!

 

Raid?? I did see see this:

http://www.computermarket.com/mall/392EC579/Megabytes_Misc_14.html

Do I still need to upgrade my power supply and cooling.

Not Porn but amzing how it builds up. Every Futerama, Smallville films MP3's etc....

 

Do a search for RAID. I don't know enough about it myself to explain it. This is what is used to set up mirrored or striped arrays of two or more disks.

That IDE card would steal bandwidth of your main bus, slowing down your soundcard, tv card etc.

Your best bet for the time being is to replace your 40Gb disk with another 120Gb one. You would need to change little else if you did this.

Or get yourself a DVD writer and backup your videos or back stuff up to CDR.

 

Do you want to keep the data on the HD?
You can add an other HD buy taking an other lead of your IDE2 on the MB Or use a lead that has a second socket on the lead most do. Then set the new HD to slave, this will then show up as D drive.
Raid can be used to mirror drives i.e. if one goes you have a back up of everything, or striping 1 bit of info goes to 1 them the other HD, you then can retrieve date twice a fast. Only thing you lose all the data on your first drive if you use it in a stripe, and data has to be started from scratch. Also you have to use similar sized drives, as if you use a 100GB drive and a 120 GB you will only get the use of 100 on the 120 drive.