New Hard Drive Install

[TIN CAN]

Right Oh i have purchased a new Maxtor harddrive diamondmax10 200gb ATA133 (one in Biggys section) and the thing is i need help. Its IDE

i know a bit about computers but never changed or put in any hardware. Could someone guide me as to what to do etc.....


Thanks

[TIN CAN]

running win xp home at moment ....

[vgopal]

its not too difficult, most likely you will have a spare slot which the hard drive will screw into, if this is going to be a secondary hard drive, set the drive to slave by little jumpers on the end of it. plug in the power cable and the ide cable, this will most likely be already connected to the existing hard drive, but there should be a free connector on the drive.

thats basically it.

[TIN CAN]

Thanks so once its all connected up is there any software i.e windows xp need loading on it. This will be the slave HD. Mind you if there is no room for it not sure what i am going to do lol...

[danthescan]

Na if its a slave windows will see it and ask you to format it so thats all you need to do really.then store all yer stuff on it

[TIN CAN]

thanks both of you, i managed to get it in and after a bit of fiddling with a bit of software called max (something) off the maxtor web site it finally recognised it...


Off to fill it up lol.....

Oh one last question, as its a slave drive and only for storage is it better to leave it as is with no partitions or ???

[Q-Buster]

You should format the drive as NTFS, this makes better use of the space on the drive, meaning less wastage. The default cluster size on a 200Gb drive with FAT32 is 16Kb, so a 15 Kb file will use 1 cluster, a 17Kb file will use 2 clusters. So, on average, you waste half a cluster (8Kb) for each file stored on a partition. With NTFS, the default cluster size is 4Kb, wasting much less space. And NTFS is supposedly more secure, less likely to lose data. Or so I have read lol.

Q-Buster

[danthescan]

Your call there m8 but with partitions it will be easier to organise stuff on, music on one, dvds on another and porn somewhere else.