Hard Drive help

[Vince Debart]

I need to add a media storage drive,
I have a Dell 2350 2.4 P4 640 megs ram and a 30 gig HD so am looking to add a 160 or so gig HD any input would be appreciated

Thanks

Vince

BTW am running Vegas 4

[Rob Lohman]

What kind of input are you looking for? Do you have any experience
installing a new harddisk inside a computer? If not, I would advise
to go with an external harddisk with at least an USB2 connection
but if possible a firewire connection AS WELL (see below). This
way you can easy bring your footage somewhere else if you want
and you don't need to open your PC and fiddle with your PC and
whatnot. I personally have Maxtor OneTouch 160 GB USB2/firewire
external drive.

Now on those connections. A lot of people seem to have the
feeling that the firewire connection will be faster to transfer
data than the USB2 connection and in theory this should be
the case. I did a couple of tests with my drive and a couple of
computers a while back and I found the difference to be VERY
small in my tests. In realworld use I could not detect a speed
difference at all.

I would make sure you at least have an USB2 port on the drive
since most computers have multiple USB2 ports and only one
firewire port (if it has one at all). I (and other people) have had
problems for example where I had the drive firewire connected
to my Dell laptop (only one port) and had my XL1S connected
through firewire to the drive. This presented problems when
capturing from the camera to the harddisk. This did not occur
when I had the camera directly connected to my laptops firewire
port and the drive on an USB2 port.

Just so you know....

[Vince Debart]

Sorry

I should have been more specific, I am looking for a recommendation on an internal hard drive I have a good buddy who will help with the install ..So I am looking for a manufacture and a model #

do you think this drive would work

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...uctCode=101562

Thanks

Vince

[Dan Euritt]

that is a serial ata drive... does your pc have serial ata ports to hook it up to? if not, you will have to stick to the standard ide interface.

also make sure that you have an empty drive bay for the hard drive... most likely you do, but i'm not familiar with your pc.

[Glenn Chan]

Lower end Dells like the Dimension 2400 only have one hard drive bay, but you should be able to hack another drive into there.

One way: You can put it on top of something and place something non-conductive under the drive so the pins and electronics don't have short circuits.

I haven't tried this myself but it should be quite possible. You could take a look inside your case.

[Vince Debart]

thanks guys

[Daniel Runyon]

For $177 shipping and all, I just got a Western Digital 250gb ide...which is indeed the type youre going to need on a standard Dell. If you go to ebay and use the directory to go to internal hard drives look for the WD 250gb from Nova Computer. Good price.....fast ship....works great.

[Fred Finn]

You can get a 200gb for pretty cheap if you surf around. Do a search through google.


Ohh what OS are you running? If it's XP you're ok. But if it is ME or 98 you'll need to stay below, i think it's 137 gigs, or you'll need to get a pci ide interface card. Microsoft's foresight didn't imagine hard drives growing above 137... Software giant haah.

[Dan Euritt]

xp or win2k is no guarantee that you can run big hard drives.

there is a specific microsoft bulletin that discusses the need to upgrade your atapi.sys(?) file, so that it is capable of addressing big drives... that upgrade is supposed to be in the winxp sp1 update, but it didn't get installed in my update.

[Vince Debart]

running Win2K pro...

thanks for the help

Vince