Upgrading your PC

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Published on: 23-05-2004
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Hard Drive

When to upgrade the hard drive

Something else to consider is upgrading your PCs hard disk. Video clips, games and music downloads all add up to a large amounts of disk space being used and it doesn’t take long to fill a lower capacity hard disk to bursting point.

There are a number of options here. You could simply replace your original hard drive with a new one, but this means starting from scratch and reinstalling all the software, documents and files that were stored on the old hard drive on the new one. A task the will inevitably take a few hours if not a day to perform. An alternative is to install the new hard drive alongside the old one so that there are two disks sitting inside the PC. However, doing this can complicate things, as you need to make sure that the new disk is configured as “slave”, while the original disk is set to “master”. This can involve a bit of fiddling with “jumpers” and cables, so make sure that any hard drive you purchase includes a nice, clear manual to help you out. One last alternative is an “external” hard drive; these are generally USB and are usually an easy alternative to opening up your PC.

The most important detail to look for when buying a new hard drive is storage capacity. For the “download fiend”, audiophile or video buff I’d recommend you buy the biggest hard drive you can afford - it’ll fill up soon enough! Also look for a hard drive with a 7200 rpm speed rating, don’t settle for anything less. If your storage requirements are a little more modest, you can probably get by quite happily with a 60-80Gb hard drive.

One more technical detail to watch out for is the choice between ATA (also known as IDE/EIDE) and Serial ATA (SATA) drives. Serial ATA disk drives are faster than ordinary ATA drives, but older PC’s may not be able to use them, so remember, check this with the retailer before buying a new drive.

All the above assumes your happy with opening up “the box” and start installing a new disk drive inside. A simpler option is to buy an external hard drive instead. These can sit on your PC or desk and connect to one of the USB or FireWire ports on your PC; make sure you have either port before you buy. You can get a massive 250Gb external hard drive for £200-£250, or a more modest 80Gb for £100. Internal hard drives a lot cheaper, an 80Gb for around £40.

CD/DVD Writer Drives

When to upgrade optical storage devices

Another way of adding more storage to your PC is to buy an “optical drive”, such as a CD or DVD writer. Most PCs built in the past couple of years should already have at least a CDRW, but they are a very handy upgrade for the older PC. Blank CDs and DVD’s are pretty cheap these days, so they provide a low-cost way of storing files. And, of course, they allow you to create your own audio CDs and video DVDs as well. Like external hard drives, it is also possible to hook-up an external CDRW/DVDRW drive using one of your spare USB ports.

USB2/Firewire

Upgrading the connectivity of a PC

Now a word of warning... Newer PCs will have what’s know as USB2, which is almost 10 times faster than the original USB1.1 specification found on the older PC, again your PC manual should tell you what spec’ port your PC uses.

A USB2 device, such as mentioned above, can still be connected to the older port but at a slower transfer speed and will act as a bottleneck that will prevent the disk from running at full speed. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to the problem … install a USB upgrade card that will give you an additional 2 or more USB2 ports. Companies such as Belkin and Adaptec sell these upgrade cards for about £30, though you should find other brands cheaper. This is a very worthwhile upgrade as they allow you to use all the latest USB2 peripherals. This is also an ideal way for the older PC that does not have any USB ports at all. However, watch out if you’ve got one of the really old machines, as older versions of Windows (95/98) can be a bit temperamental about working with USB devices. Always check it will work with your system.

If you have a digital video camera you will definitely need a FireWire interface card to connect it to your PC. You can kill two birds with one stone and buy a product such as Belkin’s handy combo card, which provides both USB2 & FireWire on the one card.