Hard Drive Upgrade Options

Hard Drive upgrades are common for many Windows XP users who are taking advantage of the multitude of multi-media gadgets from digital video recorders to iPods but bought their systems before large inexpensive hard drives became the norm. Currently, you can expect to pay about $90 to $130 for drives ranging in size from 500 GB to 1,000 GB [or 1 Terabyte]. But first you have to determine the type of drive your system can use.

Up to a few years ago, most PC hard drives were Parallel ATA [PATA] which, upon inspection, are obvious because they are connected to your motherboard by a cable that resembles a wide ribbon. More recently Serial ATA [SATA] drives are the technology shipped with PC's using a cable and connector that looks similar to the power connectors from your power supply to the peripherals in your system.

There are other options such as SCSI drives which are much faster and expensive and solid state drives [SSD] that resemble flash drive and as such have no moving parts. But the proven technology widely distributed is SATA and the low prices reflect the volume being shipped.

PATA to SATA Upgrades

If your system currently has a PATA drive you may not have a SATA connector on your motherboard. In that case you can utilize a PCI SATA adapter to add SATA capability to your system. If this is the solution dictated by your system you will be installing the PCI SATA card before installing the hard drive. When you transfer the content of your old PATA to your new SATA hard drive, the drivers for you SATA adapter will be installed and ready to boot from your new SATA drive. To transfer data from your old drive to the new SATA drive you will have to have both in place anyway.

Cloning Old Boot Drive to New Drive

To clone your old drive you are going to need a disk utility to get the job done. Seagate Barracuda Internal Hard Drive Upgrade Kits come with the disk utilities and connector cables you might need. Be careful if shopping for a better price that you get what you need. OEM versions may not come with anything but the drive. Alternately, you can buy a third party disk utility such as Norton Ghost for about $69. Additionally, you may need to order the connector cables as well.

If your not a geek or don't have recent pc repair manuals your going to want to use a retail upgrade kit. In any event be sure to back up critical data before performing any operation on your hard drive; a minor inconvenience compared to the possible catastrophy that might ensue.

The manuals that come with these drives and the disk utilities are vary straight forward for upgrading your PATA drive with a new PATA drive or a SATA drive with a new SATA drive. What we've noticed is the documentation fails to include upgrading a PATA with a new SATA drive. In that case you will want to install a SATA PCI host adapter as described above if your motherboard doesn't have a SATA slot. Leave your current PATA drive as the boot drive and install the disk utility. Then turn off your system and connect the SATA upgrade and start your system. Run the utility which will ask which is the source drive which would be your current "C" drive and select your new SATA as the destination. You will be instructed to reboot at which point the disk utility will start and copy the content of your PATA to your SATA drive. When that is done, shut down, remove the old drive and your system should boot to your new drive.