Upgrade the Hard Drive

How to decide if a Hard Drive Upgrade is Cost Effective

A hard drive upgrade usually the no-brainer of the lot. If you run out of space, you add another hard drive, right? You can buy a brand new 160 GB hard drive for less than $100 if you shop around, though getting your operating system to partition the whole space can be a trick. You may, however, encounter some pitfalls in the process, and I can sum these up with one word - software.

For starters, if you've used up all your hard drive space to the point that the system is crashing for lack of virtual memory, simply installing a new drive to add capacity won't fix the problem. You'd need to actually move your data to the new drive (moving programs is trickier) which leaves your applications looking in the wrong places for stuff. This leads most people to actually replace their existing hard drive, rather than adding the new drive as a slave. If your system is slow and the hard drive isn't full or fragmented, don't blame the hard drive.

If you buy a retail hard drive upgrade kit, as opposed to a bare drive, the hard drive manufacturer will usually provide a piece of software that can create an exact copy of your old hard drive on the new drive, allowing you to make the new drive the boot drive. This solves all the problems with moving software or data around, though it takes a good long time. Since the software shouldn't erase your old drive, it's pretty safe, though it involves moving around the drive jumpers. There are after-market utilities like Ghost that will do the same thing, image one hard drive to another.

Getting back to that 160 GB drive, capacity has surged to pass the imagination of software engineers of the early 21st century. The 32 bit addressing used in the original version of Windows XP and earlier Windows iterations is limited to 137 GB. I recently installed a brand new 160 GB Western Digital drive for a friend which shipped with its own controller and software to bypass the 32 bit limit. Followed all the instructions, it didn't work, and I know how to upgrade a hard drive:-) Rather than get involved with an XP service pack for the sake of 20 more GB, we let it slide. I mean, who can complain about a (formatted) 132 GB work of space for under $99?

IDE hard drives, with the exception of the new Serial ATA drives, are all backwards compatible, which means they're happy to run slower on an older controller that can't support their top transfer speed. This makes shopping for a hard drive upgrade pretty easy, I've never run into a compatibility problem within the correct family of technology (i.e., ATA as opposed to SCSI). However, many notebook and laptop computers have a hard limit in the BIOS as to the capacity drive they'll support, even though the physical interface is pretty standard.

You can buy a PCI adapter that will let you run the new SATA drives, but the bandwidth limitation (133 MB/s) of the standard PCI bus means you're limiting the 150 MB/s bandwidth on SATA. Since that's really a cache to controller speed, it's not really a problem for one drive, but if you buy a PCI SATA RAID controller in hopes of increasing performance, I've got my doubts it will achieve much for you. You'll also need an SATA power adapter unless your power supply is a brand new model with SATA connectors, but that's a $1 part.

The most common problem you'll run into when replacing a hard drive is a case that won't allow you room for two drives, or one that requires a 3.5" to 5.25" frame kit if you want to add a drive. Replacing a hard drive in a laptop can be a little nerve racking the first time. You might also encounter a system with no free power supply leads, though you can borrow one from another drive for long enough to get your existing drive copied over, and then you can use the lead off the old hard drive which gets removed afterwards.

Illustrated guide to replacing a hard drive