I want to buy a new hard drive (I currently
have a 9.8 GB HD) I want to upgrade to 60
GB. If I buy a USB HD do I keep my 9.8 and
now I have 69.8 GB?? Also I am thinking
about this HD here is it's description.
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OEM(Quantum) 60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive MSRP
129.99 Warranty Period 1 yr. manufacturer
Manufacturer OEM(Quantum) Condition New
Manufacturer Part No. Packaging Sealed
Boxed In Stock And Ready To Ship! Features
and Benefits These hard drives give the
user reliability, quiet operation, low
total cost of ownership, and the ability to
support the most popular applications:
Storage Capacity: 60.0 GB Average Seek
Time:approx. 8.9 ms Rotational Speed: 7,200
RPM Transfer Mode: 66MB/sec Availability:
Usually ships the same business day.
Regular price: $129.99 shipping is 12.95
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Is this a good deal or keep looking?(Im
bidding on it so what should I go up to or
not go up to?
If USB HD's are not a good idea what should
I get?
Thanks
-John

This is kind of expensive.

You can have 4 ide devices (2 one ide channel 1 and 2 on ide channel 2). The floppy drive is controlled by a floppy drive controller, unless you have an LS-120 (120mb floppy).

If you have one hard drive, a cd or dvd reader and a cd writer, you still have room for one internal harddrive (asuming you do not have a zip drive, tape backup, etc). If you already have 4 ide devices, you can buy a pci IDE card pretty cheap.

You can buy a 60gb IDE hard drive for around $70 (www.pricewatch.com). Data Transfer is faster with an internal ide drive. You can also boot from an ide hard drive with no special set up.

The only real advantage to a USB drive is portability - you can move it from one computer to another. If this is not an issue, go with the internal.

So is this a good choice?
*60gb Maxtor 5400RPM U100/133 9ms White Label
site = http://www.7bytes.com/productm.cgi?HD
then search there for "*60gb Maxtor 5400RPM U100/133 9ms White Label" without the quotes. It's under the Maxtor section. 7th one down.
There is a picture there. Thanks.
-John

I would go with a 7200rpm drive. However,
I will assume your current drive is 5400.

If you purchase a new 7200, you would have to set it as master and load the o/s onto the new one to take advantage of the faster speed. Transfers between the drives will run at the slower speed.

Under 60mb hard drives on pricewatch, the 4th one down is a maxtor 7200 (72.90) The 5th one down is a western digital 7200 (73.49). Any Maxtor or Western Digital is a good choice. Just over $1 per mb is a good price.

The 5400 vs 7200 is up to you.

Also, FYI, with some older motherboards, you may need to use the bios extender that comes with the drive to have the larger partitions recognized. You can search the threads on this site for "hard drive" to find more info.