Putting a new hard drive in your machine is not only simple, it may improve your performance too
Jun 09 '00
Yes, that is correct. You can get a decent performance increase by upgrading your hard drive, depending of course, on your circumstances. For this review, I will assume the user is using an IDE hard drive, not a SCSI hard drive. I will cover the basics of hard drive selection including the topic of IDE vs SCSI, physical installation of hard drives, and how and when to transfer data from one your existing hard drive to the new hard drive.
First, the basics
When the average person shops for a computer, they will pay attention to the speed of the processor, the amount of RAM, and the amount of hard drive space. (And price, of course). However, most people do not realize that it isn't only the size of the hard drive that is important, the speed can have a dramatic impact on overall system performance. A few years ago, I saw an article on www.x86.org about doctoring performance specs of PCs. For the article, they compared a Pentium 166MMx against a Pentium II 300. The Pentium II 300 had a slow IDE hard drive, and a slow video card. The Pentium 166 had a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive, and a high end (at the time) video card. The Pentium 166 actually beat the Pentium II 300 in several benchmarks.
For people purchasing IDE drives, the most common rotation speeds are 5400RPM and 7200RPM. Do yourself a favor, get the 7200 RPM drives. You will not believe how much faster your system will be. In addition to rotation speed, buffer size is important. The bigger the better. The buffer is used to write data to before it is loaded to the hard drive. Since memory is several thousand times faster than disk accesses, you can improve performance by writing to a buffer that loads off cycle to the hard drive. Insist on a 2MB buffer with your 7200 RPM drive. I personally recommend either the IBM or Western Digital hard drives. (They are identical. IBM is the outsourcer for Western Digital on the 7200 RPM 2MB cache hard drives)
IDE vs SCSI, a topic so contorversial, it deserves to be bolded
OK, I don't care if you call me an idiot or not, but IDE is the best choice for most people. I realize that the architecture of SCSI is superior in that it consumes less CPU cycles for communication with the devices, and up to 15 devices can be chained to a single SCSI adapter, but even still, the cost differential between a SCSI drive and an IDE drive of the same basic spec when combined with the cost of a good SCSI card simply doesn't justify the performance gain. A good 7200RPM IDE hard drive is about as fast as a 7200 RPM SCSI drive in a single drive configuration. If you really want extra performance, I would recommend a Fasttrak 66 IDE RAID controller card from Promise. You can run up to 4 hard drives in either RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 0+1 configurations. RAID 0 combines bandwidth of drives and with 2 7200RPM hard drives, you will have better performance than a 10,000RPM SCSI drive for less money.
Ok, enough of the tech stuff, I will get an IBM 7200 RPM drive, but how do I put it in?
Good question. Although installation is very simple, your specific conditions may change the recommend way of installing your hard drive. Basically you have 3 options:
Install new hard drive as slave to original drive The pros to this tactic is that it involves the least work. You
1) Set the jumper on the hard drive to the slave position
2) pop open the case of your computer
3) Install Hard Drive. ( Put the hard drive in an open drive bay, attach a few screws, plug in a spare power connector from your Power Supply, attach the free IDE port on the cable of your existing hard drive to the connection on the new drive)
4) close the case
5)go into the bios of your motherboard and change a few things
6) Use a utility like Partition Magic, or FDISK to put a partition on the new hard drive
and you are good to go. The downside is that you won't get much of a speed improvement from this strategy. If you are currently using a non 7200 RPM hard drive, there will be a performance increase in all applications if Windows (Linux, or whater OS you are running) is loaded on the faster hard drive. By doing the lazy man's approach to an install, you won't gain any performance. This method is only recommended if you have a 7200 RPM drive as your primary drive, and you are merely adding a second drive for increased capacity. (You may want to read the review I will write on the Fastrak IDE RAID controller soon)
Move data from old hard drive to new hard drive, don't use old hard drive
If you have an older, slower drive, you will want to migrate your data to the new drive. Although there are various utilities that come with hard drives to accomplish the task, there is no better tool for the job than Ghost. (Read my epinion on Ghost) Ghost will clone your existing hard drive to a new hard drive in about 15 minutes. It works flawlessly, and it is the quickest, easiest way to move your data. Ghost can be bought for about $30, but it is commonly bundled with hard drives and motherboards. If you are a first time user, a demo copy that will time out in 30 days can be downloaded from www.symantec.com . The steps you will need to take are as follows.
1) Set the jumper on the new drive to the SLAVE position
2) Install the new drive
3) Setup the BIOS to recognize the new drive (see your motherboard manual, or ask me questions)
4) Boot to Windows, and install Ghost
5) Use Ghost to copy your existing Hard Drive to the new one
6) Shut down your computer
7) Remove old hard drive
8) Set the jumper on the new drive to the MASTER position
9) Reinstall your new drive using the same "socket" on the IDE cable that your original drive used
9) Reset your BIOS to recognize the change in your hard drive
Note: It will not be necessary to FDISK the new drive, Ghost takes care of the paritions for you.
This will give you the fastest machine, and is the recommended solution for most hard drive upgrades. the extra work IS worth your time.
Move data from old hard drive to new hard drive, reuse old hard drive
Do the same as above, but set the old hard drive as SLAVE and reinstall. When you boot, you will be running the new hard drive for Windows and all your programs. You can just reformant, and reuse your old hard drive. The downside to this approach is for owners of older, slower hard drives. If your existing hard drive is 5400RPM or less, your best bet is to spend a few extra dollars for the extra capacity you desire on your new hard drive. If you do want to reuse your old drive, be aware that the performance will be slower for anything installed on that drive. Use that knowledge to your advantage and use the storage space for things that won't affect your performance. i.e. MP3 files, documents for Word and Excell (but not Access), and things of that nature. Do not install programs there, or use it for programs that you are not as concerned about performance because of frequency of use, or perfomance of the program.
Lastly, you should do the installation yourself. Although it is not as simple as installing memory (See my Epinion on the subject), there are reasons to do it yourself. If you take your machine into the average Best Buy, you aren't likely to get people concerned about maximizing the performance of your machine. If you do it yourself, you can make sure that it is done right.
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Member: Steve Larrison
Location: Scottsdale, Az. USA
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