Need advice on adding a media storage HDD to my 2007 Dell (Pics of motherboard).

runswithascript

Many moons ago in 2007 I purchased my Dell Dimension C521 and I would like to add an extra hard disk drive to it which I think should be possible.

There is a power cable coming from the PSU which has a connector off it labelled P3 going into my existing hardrive, and off the same cable there is a similar unused P5 connector so I think I should be sorted for power?

The stock PSU is 350W. I have installed a HD Radeon 4650 but I do not really use this machine for gaming anymore.

I can see two empty SATA ports on the motherboard, please see screenshots, but can I freely use them? And will any SATA 300 cable do?

Googling a code I found when right clicking the disk in my computer and selecting properties outputs:

Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AS 320 GB 3.5 Internal Hard Drive - SATA/300 - 7200

I was thinking of going with:

WD 2TB 3.5" SATA-600 IntelliPower 64MB

König Internal SATA 3.0 data cable - Law - 0.5m

Would you rate that a good drive for media storage only, and will I have any problems formatting it under Windows XP? Perhaps you would recommend a better drive for similar money? As far as I know there should be no problem with linux. Also, Komplett list the interface type as Serial ATA-600, so will I need some kind of adaptor?

Two spare SATA ports labelled SATA 4 and SATA 5. (white and black)



Connectors on existing HDD:

tuxy

SATA is backward compatible. The 600 will work with all lower versions of SATA at the lower speed.
I've been buying mostly WD drives for years never any trouble so I say go for it.

Will work fine with XP just format it to ntfs .

runswithascript

tuxy wrote: »

SATA is backward compatible. The 600 will work with all lower versions of SATA at the lower speed.
I've been buying mostly WD drives for years never any trouble so I say go for it.

Will work fine with XP just format it to ntfs .

Thanks

Done and done! On the way cheaper from Amazon and I'm glad I noticed I do need a SATA cable with one right angle connector!

Next stop NAS!

runswithascript

So I received the 2TB HDD and I have power going to it, and a SATA cable that goes to one of the ports on the motherboard but it is not visible in My Computer.

Do I need to use a jumper clip or something to set it as slave? There was none in the box.

Any other ideas?

If relevant the existing old HDD which is still connected is partitioned several times into different formats.

tuxy

Open the start menu, right right click computer and select manage. Got to disk management. Right click the new drive and format to ntfs.

runswithascript

Thanks, but it's still not visible there.

I had a look in the drive in GParted and I was able to create and MSDOS partition table and format it to NTFS but on logging back into Windows XP the drive was still not visible in My Computer or Disk Management.

I tried the same usinb FAT32 to see if it would make any difference but it did not.

Any thoughts?

I am trying PartitionMagic now.

tuxy

Is windows xp up to date?
I think there was a patch at some stage to support drives that size.

runswithascript

tuxy wrote: »

Is windows xp up to date?
I think there was a patch at some stage to support drives that size.

Good thinking but Windows XP tells me no priority updates are available although there are some optional hardware updates which I am applying now.

Also, the screen just went black a few minutes ago and the computer rebooted and once it had it told me a new device Generic Volume has been found but it will not work properly until I restart which I will do after the updates complete.

runswithascript

Thanks for the help.

For anyone experiencing this problem reading this thread in the future; although linux would allow me to format the drive when Windows would not even see it, in order to access it from either OS I need to enable the hereunto-now unused SATA port from the BIOS.

Once that was done everything worked as it should.

tuxy

Good info to know. Glad you got it sorted.