Adding an Extra Hard Drive.

Of course you need to know, first of all, what kind of drive you need before you buy it. To find this out read through the computer's manuals, or you can just open the machine case and have a look into it.

Before you open the casing you need to be aware of the dangers of static and the damage it can cause to the delicate machine. To remove some of the danger it would be wise to wear an anti-static wrist band.

Firstly, find out how many hard disk drives already exist in the machine. Most of the machines have only one, and therefore it is relatively easy to install an extra hard drive. Inside the casing should find an optical drive for the CD/DVD, maybe a floppy disk drive and the single hard disk drive.

The cable system is very important when adding an extra hard drive to the computer. There are two common cable systems used to connect drives to the motherboard. One system includes the IDE drives, which are also known as PATA or Parallel ATA. These cables are flat or thick and are as wide as your finger.

The other system has the SATA drives or the Serial ATA drives. For this the cables are thin and are about the diameter of a pencil. By examining the cables, you should know which cables you will have to purchase for installing your extra hard drive.

It is also possible that your computer has SCSI hard drives, for which you need SCSI cables. The common and mass-market computers will generally have the PATA or the SATA drives.
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if your machine already has two drives, then it becomes a little difficult to install a third one. If there is no more space left inside the cage, the other option is to add an external drive.

An external enclosure system is probably the easiest way to add an extra hard drive to your computer. The system is simple because here a standard hard drive is put into a desk-friendly case and then plugged into your computer via USB or FireWire. After you format your new hard drive, it immediately registers as an extra hard drive on your computer. Now you can operate as though it was an internal drive.

The biggest advantage of an external enclosure system is that it is possible to change the hard drive without any trouble if you need even more space. You can also transfer the drive from one PC to another. On the safety side, you don't even need to open up the old machine to make any changes. This is the best protection against static.

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Apart from the stadard hard drive available to increase your memory. The is always the option of a memory stick that simply plugs into your usb port and off you go.

At the time of writing I believe there are sticks available with 8gb of memory and still growing.

The funny thing is that my first pc had a hard drive smaller than this.