Dell Hard Drive Questions

[warpig2003]

Hello, I'm not sure on the exact model, but I have a Dell Dimension and that I recieved it around May 2003. I got the computer with a 60 gig and now I'd like to use that as my master hard drive, while adding a 80 to 120 gig hard drive as a slave for mostly just file (mp3, documents, few short videos) storage.

Now, my question is... is there anything I need to worry about? What scares me is that I searched this site some and saw that people had troubles uprgrading Dells. My buddy is good at computers and offered to help, but I'd like to know what I'm doing before hand so I don't **** up my computer.

Is there a certain brand hard drive I should look for? If I'm using it as my slave and not using it for games or anything, should I worry much about the speed of the hard drive?

Also, would the master still read the slave if i I installed the slave and then reformat the master hard drive? Basically I'm just a college kid that has alot of crap that I don't want lost of my master hard drive crashes.

Thanks for all the help.

 

[YanBooth]

You just need to find if your motherboard has SATA connections on the mobo. If not, just grab a EIDE hard drive, and check your current hard drive to see where to set the jumpers as master, and the new drive to see where to set the jumpers to slave...
Yan

 

[YanBooth]

Another suggestion, get more RAM while you are at it...

 

[warpig2003]

i have 512mb ram and im pretty happy with how fast it runs, do i really need to worry about that or does the ram get affected by adding another drive? all i do is download music, homework, and check email basically.

do i need a special hard drive if it has SATA connections? from your response it seems that most hard drives are EIDE so id have to look for one with SATA connections. SATA is the newer and better connection right?