Hard Drive Help!

mondayuk

Little_John wrote:

A USB drive is great for occasional storage but no good for replaceing a system drive, the aditional power connectors and extra wires internal is much better and a lot faster especially if they dont have USB2.

Most PC's can support 4 IDE drives from 2 ports SATA drives require a port for each drive.

My understanding from the original post was that it was simply to add extra storage and not replace a system drive.

Regarding the drive limit, most people have at least one CD/DVD drive, sometimes two. And once you have a hard drive and a floppy drive in use a lot of cases, especially for branded systems, do not have the capacity to house an additional 3.5inch drive.

I'm not suggesting that you dont use an internal drive, i'm just warning you that it might not just be as simple as getting a man round to install it for you if you dont have the room for it thats all. Most people have USB ports free, and the advantage of essentially no fitting/installation is pretty clear.

Little_John

Hiya
Its a Microstar MS-6583 motherboard Which I think uses the SiS 646 chipset There is no information about this motherboard in English or other language I can understand on the web I have contacted MSI to see if they will tell me anything.
John

danzeg

mondayuk wrote:

My understanding from the original post was that it was simply to add extra storage and not replace a system drive.

Regarding the drive limit, most people have at least one CD/DVD drive, sometimes two. And once you have a hard drive and a floppy drive in use a lot of cases, especially for branded systems, do not have the capacity to house an additional 3.5inch drive.

I'm not suggesting that you dont use an internal drive, i'm just warning you that it might not just be as simple as getting a man round to install it for you if you dont have the room for it thats all. Most people have USB ports free, and the advantage of essentially no fitting/installation is pretty clear.

I dont have a problem installing a hard drive, as i think that if i was to have a prblem, someone could help me. Yes... i do have spare usb ports, but doesnt it take energy or something out of the motherboard - or does it contain a plug. i personally think that i would need an internal one as the speed of getting the documents/files may become a problem....also, i regularly back up my data na dit doesnt take me long to install software...so now im in two minds..

albertross_2

80Gb is a lot of data, is this all music and video's?

You could always consider software compression (unless all this data is mp3's and mpg's which won't compress any further) and a good tidy up instead. cleanmgr https://www.ccleaner.com etc..

Little_John

Software compression was only ever usefull in the days of 2 and 4GB drive that cost £100 a GB and is no solution for current PC requirements, the extra demands made on the PC to decompress for use isnt worth it especially when you can get 320GB drives for under £80 now and the fact that most files now already use compression mp3, divx jpg not that many files can be compressed much more.

albertross_2

It is as useful now, as it has always been, and with modern processors and ram has no performance impact. As you and I said, it is no good for compressing already compressed video and music files.

This is a money saving site.. £80 is £80.

Blackjack_Davy

danzeg wrote:

I dont have a problem installing a hard drive, as i think that if i was to have a prblem, someone could help me. Yes... i do have spare usb ports, but doesnt it take energy or something out of the motherboard - or does it contain a plug. i personally think that i would need an internal one as the speed of getting the documents/files may become a problem....also, i regularly back up my data na dit doesnt take me long to install software...so now im in two minds..

Always go for a internal hard drive if you can USB drives should be a last resort only they're slow and expensive.

IDE will allow 4 devices to be connected: so if you have, say, 2 DVD/CD drives fitted and 1 hard drive you can fit one more device: the hard drive.

Take a peek inside the case: have a look where the hard drive is and see if theres room to fit another. If so there you go. It needs to plugged into a spare connector on the IDE cable (the same as plugs into the other HDD/drives) and it needs one power (molex) connector to be available and away you go!

roswell

if its purely for storage of file get an external hard drive, as for the slow ness im not sure where people are getting this info from because its exactly the same drive as you put in your pc just in a nice case with some adapton wires, or better still get a fast seagate 7500 rpm hard drive and by an external case to put in it yourself.

mondayuk

Agreed roswell. Technically I beleive the speed difference is in the transfer rate (especially if you are not using USB 2), however having used these in the past I noticed no discernable speed drop.

As for power, most external USBs are not "bus powered". That is you need to plug it into a power socket as well as your computer, however there are some which draw their power from the PC itself (or the USB hub if you have one of those). In either case there will be no performance penalty on your PC.

Compression is another good answer albertross and is worth considering. There is a slight performance penalty to pay for this, but I say try it. If your PC slows down or the files dont compress well then you've lost nothing, just uncompress and resume your search for a hard drive.

I agree the 80gb storange you have is usually sufficient for system files and program files, beyond that if you're storing large files then either an internal IDE or an external USB drive will be perfectly adequate. If you're still in two minds then open the case, and have a look to see what you'll be able to get away with. If you have hard drive slots available then an internal one is a good solution. If you have no slots available then consider an external.