Types of Internal Hard Drives

Series Summary

Is your computer in need of an upgrade? Still fumbling around with floppies? Maybe it’s time to step in to the 21st century and add a DVD drive to your system. Installing an internal drive to your PC is not quite the daunting task you might think. It’s also a great way to add extra storage to hold that massive collection of mp3s, photos and videos that’s been accumulating over the last few years. Your motherboard will thank you.

In this series of free video clips you’ll get step-by-step instruction on how to install internal drives on your computer. A+ certified expert James Adams shows you the different types of hard drives and cables you’ll need to get started, and demonstrates how to install IDE, CD-DVD, and series ATA hard drives, as well as a hard drive for extra storage. He also shows you how to connect a floppy drive, should you ever feel nostalgic for that retro feel, and offers tips and techniques for troubleshooting hard drives to keep you operating at optimum efficiency.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m James Adams and I’m here for expertvillage.com. I have an A+ certification which certifies me to work on PC”s and I’m been doing this since I was in high school 10 years ago, troubleshooting. I built too many PC’s and helped too many people to even count. Now we’re going to talk about internal hard drives, so this is a floppy drive this is old school it’s been used for ever since in the 80’s and floppies go bad so unless you absolutely need to I would say don’t go with a floppy drive, you can buy a USB drive really cheap I think I saw for $30 you can get 1 gig at Wal-Mart which is the capacity of like probably about a 1,000 floppies, so unless you absolutely need to get a floppy you can ignore it now days. Now then we have the old trusty CD rewriter from the early 90’s, this one can read the disks only holds about 700 megs and you can burn music CD’s but the use of this is really limited now days I mean CD writers you can find one for about 10, $15 really. Now if you really want to have fun you can go with one of these, this is a DVD writer it’ll do everything that the CD writer can do and more, let’s say you have your family vacation video you can transfer to computer and burn it on a DVD to watch on the DVD player, you can backup your movies in case your kids break them, you can do all sorts of things with a DVD writer and they’re only about 30, $35 at the store, so if you’re looking for an upgrade you should go for the DVD writer CDRW’s are old school at this point. So right here I have two different kinds of hard drives, as you can notice they got different pin arrangements, they got different connectors, this one has an old school different connector and this is the newer kind, the top hard drive is a serial ATA most computers today come equipped with a serial ATA and most of the older machines and still some of the newer machines have this IDE connector."