We received an email request from Mike Garcia, asking how to upgrade his PC’s Hardrive.

Good question so thought i’d post the answer here so it can help more people.

It’s a fairly easy project providing your comfortable with taking the casing off and swapping some wires. I’ll try and keep it real simple and tell you the important things to look out for.

Warning: This is not fool proof, and we take no responsibility for damage you may do along the way.

Upgrading Your HardDrive

K first of all pop open the case and have a look at what you’ve got.

Hard drive come in two varieties and in two sizes.

Desktop PCs normally use a 3.5″ Harddrive, and laptops a smaller 2.5″

The other thing to look for is the connector, is it Sata or IDE?

Note: the plug with the coloured (black, red yellow) wires is the power supply.

A great place to buy Harddrives from is ebuyer.com

There’s possibly two reasons your installing a new hard disk drive (hdd), either your current drive is full (likely) or your current drive is faulty.

If your current hdd is ok, then i recommend simply adding the second drive as an extra drive, this is known as a ‘Slave’drive, whilst your current hdd (the one you’ll boot from) is known as the ‘Master‘.

Adding a Second Harddrive

To tell your PC which drive is which, there’s two things you need to do. If you’re using an IDE cable, then connect your master drive to the black connector right at the end of the cable, and the slave drive to the grey connector part way down the ribbon.

There’s also the ‘jumper’ settings, these are 8 little pins on the back of the hdd, and a small black that connects two of the pins together. These can be set to Master, slave or cable select, which providing you’ve connected it up properly will auto setup.

I cant tell you the setting to use for the jumper, as every manufacturer sets it up different, you’re new hdd will tell you where the jumper goes, if not then Google it under the manufacturer’s name.

Connect the hdd to a spare power port and you’re away. The PC should automatically detect the new drive and it’ll pop up in ‘My Computer’, if there are any special setup procedures I’m sure your new drive would come with instructions.

Swapping Drives

So if your current drive is dead, simply unplug it and plug in your new drive.

To remove the drive you may have two remove small screws from the side of the bay before it’ll slide out. Of course you’ll also need to install an operating system (xp, vista etc) and you’ll have lost all your files.

To keep files, either burn them to disc, use online back up option, or the best way if at all possible use an external hdd.

When I replaced my dead drive, i used the ‘recovery cd’ set that came with my pc, and it installed the OS, lots of programs and all the drivers, so maybe give that a go.

It’s not too complicated but will take a while, especially installing a new OS, so make sure you’ve got time free and lotsa patience.

Hope this helps.