[Aproct]

Hello all,

Excuse my ignorance with desktops. I am an individual who is more into building curcuit boards for animated christmas lights. Anyway I was given a Dell Dimension 4300 desktop. The prior person took the harddrive out. I want to be able expand the memory on this unit and possible be able to instal a 1 terabyte harddrive in? I think that's right. I ordered a Seagate but one I received, the plugs for the plug ins where different than the existing ribbon cables. So since this is the wrong drive, what one can I order that will fit this machine? I would like to be able to build on this since I may have other usages for this desktop other than just for my animated show. THe unit that originally purchased was a Seagate Barracude 7200.12 1TB. Unless anyone can suggest where I maybe able to get new ribbon cables to get this unit to fit, I am open to other harddrives that may work with in this unit other than buying from dell.

Any assistance would be glad appreciated.

Andy

[Me__2001]

Sounds like you have a SATA hard drive and not an IDE one. You can buy any IDE (sometimes called PATA) hard drive and use that as the main drive for the operating system. To save wasting the 1TB drive you bought, get a SATA controller card and add it in as a second drive

[Aproct]

Thank you for getting back to me. Okay I will keep the sata drive. What specific sata card do I need to get along with any cables? So I guess I can just go out to Ebay and get a regular 250GB harddrive for this and also have the sata harddrive.

[Abarbarian]

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/161436

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/141090

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/124021

You will need one each of the above. Personally I would not buy a IDE HDD as they are expensive and old tech now.