hard drives upgrade

Often people refer to hard drives upgrade when talking about upgrading drives. However installing a new hard drive is not the only drive upgrade. Adding a DVD-Rom, a new floppy or a CD-Rom is common drives upgrade.

You can do hard drives upgrade in two ways: you can either install a new hard drive and have two functional hard drives in your computer, or replace the existing one with another drive.

What ever the case, installing a new drive is not difficult; however you must consider a few things before purchasing a new one.

• Will the drive physically fit inside the case? If you are planning to have two functional hard drives, you must be aware that some cases only have space for only one hard drive. If you are planning to install a new DVD or CD-Rom make sure the case has enough space in the front.

• Almost all motherboards have only two IDE controllers, which mean you can install 4 drives: 2 per cable. Make sure there are sufficient cables to install the drive?

• The computer BIOS and the operating system must be able to support the capacity of the hard drive ( NB: in today’s computers you will hardly find this problem)

In the old days where systems where not PnP, you had to configure the hard drive in the BIOS. Nowadays the installation and configuration are made easy. 99% of the drives are plug-n-play (PnP), which mean the system will detect it and do the installation for you.