One of my neighbors was given a thrown together 400mhz system with what appears to be a 2.5 Gig HD (with only 250mb of space left) which obviously isn't large enough to load anything on.

I told her she needs to get a bigger HD but I haven't seen any deals on 5400 rpm HD's. Staples is gonna have the Maxtor 30 Gig 7200 rpm on sale for $29.99 after rebate starting Sunday and thought this work. Only problem is I don't know if her system can handle it.

Would I need to install some sort of controller card for her system to run a 7200 rpm HD? I installed HD's before but never with a different speed than what the original system came with so I'm clueless as far as this goes.

Oh ya, I told her she should just buy a new computer since they can be had dirt cheap but she feels her's is fine for what she does.

The only thing you need to worry about is heat. Other than that, you don't need anything special to install and run a 7200 rpm HD.

And heat shouldn't even be that much of a problem...

EDIT: Read below

I had an old p133 with w98. It came with a 2 GIG HD :-(

I could never get it to recognize the new larger drives. It had something to do with the Bios date and limitations

Check the Bios dates :-)

good luck :-)

Good point.

I put together a 400mhz P2 comp once with an 80gb HD and required a BIOS update in order to detect the full capacity of the drive.

Older BIOSes would limit any one HD partition to 8.x GB (I never remember what the "x" is...). Hopefully, the mobo manufacturer released a new BIOS to alleviate this.

I tried the flashing of the Bios, I saw it on the NEC site....what a nightmare....it took me 2 days to get the puter to work again.

I lost everything, mice, sound, keyboards....EVERYthing

yuck

go get em !!!!

Yeah, flashing the BIOS can sometimes turn into a nightmare. I feel your pain.

Something to be aware of is that you can install a 30GB, ATA 100 or 133 drive in the system, but it will run at the fastest speed the motherboard is rated for. Most likely the board supports ATA 33 or 66, so that's what the drive will run at.

Also, the drive will run as fast as the slowest device on the same IDE channel. For instance, if the current drive is ATA 33 and you install the new drive on the same ribbon cable, the new drive will also run at ATA 33.

Think about how you want to install the new drive. This may be a good opportunity to reinstall the OS also. Just make sure you have all the necessary drivers for the motherboard and attached devices.

Oh, and if the computer is running Windows95a, be aware that it will only recognize 2GB partitions.

Currently OfficeMax has the Western Digital 40GB HDD on sale for $30 AR. They only mention a $30 rebate on the page, but there is an additional, unadvertised $10 rebate.

Thanks for the replies. I was actually hoping to find a 20Gb 5400rpm HD but it doesn't look like Staples carries them anymore.

garsh, while your deal is defiitely hotter I'm pretty sure her system wouldn't be able to handle a 40Gb HD. I think she'll have a better chance with a 30.

If anyone has an old 5400rpm HD that's at least 10Gb they want to get rid of at a reasonable price let me know. She doesn't put alot of stuff on her computer so 10 should be fine.

I do not understand what you mean by this...any computer that can handle a 30GB HD will have no trouble handing one of the 40GB flavor.

If you do end up having bios issues, then i would suggest getting a promise ultra ata card.

I used one in my old pentium 150..............the computer ran pretty fast with 7200 rpm drives.....

with the controller card, the hard drive was able to run at the fastest possible speed of the hard drive.

controller cards are fairly cheap too.

looks like used cards run around $15 on ebay.........

I happen to own a motherboard that can't handle a 40GB hard drive. Actually it's an issue with the BIOS. No further BIOS updates are being produced for the motherboard. The largest hard drive it will recognize is 32GB.

I see...

<-- notes that

Just to chime my experience in, I currently do own a 400Mhz P2 PC (no longer my main rig) with both a 10GB master HD and a 40GB slave. Besides the fact that I botched a Linux install on the HD and now I believe it has about 10GB worth of bad sectors, I've had no trouble at all with the 40GB on the computer.

The motherboard manufacturer doesn't come to mind at the moment... I believe there are patches out there to overcome any limitations. YMMV.

I saw this in another forum. IS it true, a lag in boot time when using the controller cards?

>The controller card is considered a SCSI device and takes close to 10 seconds to
>load during boot up