replacing my hard drive

[DB83]

It's cheaper to buy a bigger internal drive and put it in an external enclosure. And the drive itself is usually faster. Not to mention, internal drives come with a 3 year warranty, where as external drives only comes with a 1 year warranty.

That's why it's better to "complicate" things.

As long as you know what you want.

Did you open the case to see just how many free HDD bays there actually are ?. A standard mini-tower will have atleast 4.

What confuses me is that you say in one breath that there is only one HDD bay and then in the next breath you say that "All my drives are SATA" inferring that you already have more than one drive.

Oh, just one tiny point. Putting a fast-access internal hard drive into an external enclosure will NOT result in a faster external hard drive. The data transfer speed will be the same as for the standard external drive.

[DB83]

It's cheaper to buy a bigger internal drive and put it in an external enclosure. And the drive itself is usually faster. Not to mention, internal drives come with a 3 year warranty, where as external drives only comes with a 1 year warranty.

That's why it's better to "complicate" things.

And you would more than likely invalidate that warranty by adapting the drive to put it into the enclosure (as per the one linked to)

[TBoneit]

It's cheaper to buy a bigger internal drive and put it in an external enclosure. And the drive itself is usually faster. Not to mention, internal drives come with a 3 year warranty, where as external drives only comes with a 1 year warranty.

That's why it's better to "complicate" things.

The drive may be faster, however only until you put it into a USB enclosure. They run a lot slower in transfer rate over USB2.

[TBoneit]

It's cheaper to buy a bigger internal drive and put it in an external enclosure. And the drive itself is usually faster. Not to mention, internal drives come with a 3 year warranty, where as external drives only comes with a 1 year warranty.

That's why it's better to "complicate" things.

As long as you know what you want.

Did you open the case to see just how many free HDD bays there actually are ?. A standard mini-tower will have atleast 4.

What confuses me is that you say in one breath that there is only one HDD bay and then in the next breath you say that "All my drives are SATA" inferring that you already have more than one drive.

Oh, just one tiny point. Putting a fast-access internal hard drive into an external enclosure will NOT result in a faster external hard drive. The data transfer speed will be the same as for the standard external drive.

Many of the bottom line Dells only come with one drive bay for 3.5" unless you order the adaptor. They didn't even put in the brackets to hold a floppy disc if you didn't order one. Dimension 2400, 3000 etc.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Another bit of info:
If you don't want to replace the internal HDD but add drive space just install the drive then right-click on the drive in My Computer and select format,you don't need to install the OS.I recommend using firewire with an external HDD because it doesn't share bandwidth compared to USB.
http://www.directron.com/firewirevsusb.html

[DB83]

[quote="TBoneit"
Many of the bottom line Dells only come with one drive bay for 3.5" unless you order the adaptor. They didn't even put in the brackets to hold a floppy disc if you didn't order one. Dimension 2400, 3000 etc.[/quote]

That sucks. But never having bought 'off the shelf/ mail order' and chosen exactly what I want I suppose I have been sheltered from such cost-cutting.

[TBoneit]

Not only that but if you bought without specifying a Video card and leaving it as built-in video you'd get a mobo with no VGA slot. Think how much they saved by not putting in a housing for a second hard drive or floppy drive or 4 vs 2 memory slots and the AGP slot with all the computers they sell.

The more expensive models were OK with mounting for 2 hard drives and a floppy and two opticals. The trick was always figuring out which was which. We've sold more than a few hard drive mounting brackets for the Dimension series to customers.


The newer Dells seem Ok. The Inspiron 530 has 4 memory slots. 16X PCIe slot, 2 PCI slots and room for a second Optical and hard drive and floppy drive. So much better than before. The nice thing about a Dell is if you use the Dell OS disk you don't need to activate.

I work on a lot of these different computers. Many HP Desktops use a Customized Asus Mobo. Dells Overall seem reliable. Compaq the same. E-Machines we find a lot of blown power supplies and Motherboards.