Installing a Hard Drive is not hard today we are going to learn how to install an extra Hard Drive (HDD) on a computer.
The Hard Drive we are going to install, will have a SATA connections. If doing this in an older computer, adapters will be required, if power suply does not have SATA connectors.
Also if the motherboard does not have SATA connectors, then we cannot connect our SATA Hard Drive. We will need a SATA card to add SATA ports to a computer that does not have SATA ports build in.
To start we are going to first unplug our computer power cord, the cable that connects to the wall outlet, on the back of the computer.
Now we need to open up the case.
Almost every case opens by removing a screw on the back and sliding the side panel to the back.
Next we need to find out if we can fit another Hard Drive in our case.
Locate where the original Hard Drive is located at. It is usually located towards the front side of the case.
Different cases are made different. The one that I have, the Hard Drives slide from the side of the case, in. Others slide from the front of the case, and more difficult cases, are made to have the Drive slide from the inside of the case out towards the front of the case.
This is how mine looks like:
I have one Hard Drive installed already, and I have room for another one.
The drive that I have, came with four screws, a SATA cable and a SATA power cable adapter.
The screws that came with the drive (left side), are not going to work with my case. Because my case uses different screws, they came with it (right side). The screws came attached to the front side of the case, so I removed them and those are the screws that I will be using.
Having the right kind of screws, now I have to clear up to make room for my new Hard Drive.
I will start by removing the cables from the Drive that I have already installed, make sure to remember where they where, by marking them, or just remembering.
I have cleared the way for my new Drive, now I have to get my new Drive ready to slide in the case.
What I need to do first, is to attach the screws that came with my case to the new drive.
With the screws in place, its time to slide that drive in its new home.
We now have two drives in place, lets finish and start making the connections.
With all the connections made in the Hard Drive side, lets start making connections to the motherboard.
We can see that the Grey SATA cable is already connected to a port on the motherboard, lets go ahead and connect the new Drive to the open Orange port.
With the Drive connected we can now close the case and connect the power cord to the back of the computer.
With the computer ready to go, lets power on the computer.
After windows has finished loading, depending on what version of windows we have, we will see a message pop up in the Notification Area.
After this message appears, saying that windows has installed all the drivers for that new Hard Drive we installed, we can go to My Computer and we will see two drives.
One Drive will be the regular C: Drive, and the other one, depending on what letter windows assign, it might be the D: Drive or some other letter.
Thank you for reading, this will conclude this tutorial, please post any questions or comments.
