Will Adding a Hard Drive Affect the Warranty?

macman

Will adding an additional hard drive to a new desktop PC invalidate the warranty? The PC has not yet been purchased yet, most likely to be a Dell, but not necessarily so.
A friend has asked me to set up a new PC for him and move his old hard drive over (complete with programs and data) as a slave drive.
I'm suggesting that this is a messy way to do it (rather than do a clean install of the programs and copy the data over), but is the warranty an issue.
I've done RAM upgrades from new but not an additional drive.
The other issue is that it's an ancient IDE drive and I'd presumably need to buy a SATA-IDE converter to install it? Not a good idea IMHO, as the drive must be nearing the end of it's life anyway. But he's convinced himself that this way is simplest.

closed

No, PC's are designed to be upgradeable.

Some manufacturers put stickers on the casing, so they know if it has been opened, it's rare, never seen a Dell like that.

A usb enclosure is far simpler, most of the programs won't work, unless they are a portable variant. 2 drive machines tend to be noisy and use more electricity.

macman

That's what I thought. So, unless opening the case invalidates, why do they sticker them?

closed

That particular manufacturer may try and argue the point, if it came to it, but would probably lose. I can't recall the brand.

prowla

What closed said - PCs are designed to be upgradeable.

And I would also suggest that it would be a better idea to put the old drive into a USB enclosure (adding an IDE interface to put in an old drive is a bit of a strange way to do it, IMHO).

Johnmcl7

I find Dell are not an issue with upgrading parts in the sense that they don't have stickers on the machine and they're the only PC company I know that supplies the full service manuals for all their machines for free which cover detailed repairs.

However I'd agree with the posts above and buy a USB enclosure as that way the data can be conveniently moved over to the new machine and capacity is likely to be much higher than an old IDE drive.

John