hard drives

[helecopter]

I need to increase the capacity of my hard disk. How can I find out what type I should buy and can I run 2 hard drives in one pc?

[j2buttonsw]

Hard to say whithout details of your system. Some old (original Pentium) systems have an 8 GB upper limit which was set by the BIOS (you may be able to flash it to make it higher). Most newer systems (PII and above) don't have this restriction but some may not recognise very large hard drives (120 GB ones for example). Once again, mainboard manufacturers release BIOS updates to rectify this. Assuming you have a pretty new system, I would get the biggest you can afford, 7200 rpm and with highest amount of "cache" (8 MB is very good). This will be an IDE device of which you can have a maximum of 4 on your system (there are exceptions). Bear in mind that CD-ROMs (CD/DVD and CD burners) are also IDE devices. Thus, you may have a DVD drive and a CD burner plus the original hard drive leaving you space for the new hard drive. Of these 4 devices, you have two (a slave and a master) per IDE chain (the primary and secondary IDE chain). I expect your hard drive is the master of the primary IDE chain and your CD is the master of the secondary chain. If you have a DVD and CD burner I expect them to be the master and slave of the secondary IDE chain, respectively. My point is that a new hard drive would be the slave on the primary IDE chain. The master/slave settings are defined by jumpers on the drive itself. Once again, I don't know your system and the master/slave configurations on the primary/secondary IDE chains may be different. Once you have set the new drive to slave on the primary IDE chain and it all boots up you will have to get the OS to see it. In Windows 2000/XP it is easy: right click My Computer-manage then configure it using Disk Management. With Windows 9x you will have to boot using the start-up flopy disk then create a primary DOS partition on your new drive using fdisk. Alternatively, get a SCSI PCI card fitted then you can have up-to 16 SCSI hard drives (they are much faster, have higher cache and spin much quicker but are also very much more expensive).