If you need more space on your computer, you may want to upgrade your internal hard drive. This isn’t a complicated process, but you need to know some of the basics of computer hardware. Follow these three easy steps to upgrade your hard drive.

Remember, any time you make a significant change on your computer, there’s a risk of catastrophic data loss requiring hard drive data recovery. Keep the number for 24 Hour Data handy so you can start the data recovery process immediately if something goes wrong when you install your new internal HDD.

Steps to Installing a New Hard Drive

1. Look for an extra connector on your motherboard or IDE cable and make sure there’s a bay available to place the hard drive. If you have a connector on the motherboard but not on the cable, you just need to purchase a second IDE cable. Finally, check to make sure the cable will reach the bay. If you don’t have an extra bay or an extra connector, consider an external USB hard drive for extra storage, instead.

2. Check your IDE devices to determine their settings. The current hard drive should be master. If you have two IDE cables, you can set both hard drives as Master, with a CD-ROM or other device as slave. Make sure the boot hard drive is the Primary, rather than Secondary, master on your motherboard.

3. Install the drive in the bay, with the silver side of the drive on top and the connector facing toward the mother board. Using an extra power cord from your power supply, or adding a splitter to the power supply, connect the drive to the power supply. Finally, plug in the IDE cable. Your hard drive is installed, and you’ll just need to format it for your version of Windows.

 An additional hard drive will give you extra storage space, back-up potential if one drive should go bad, or can increase the speed of your computer if you make your newer, faster drive the boot drive. It’s an easy process, but if something goes wrong and you lose your important data, 24 Hour Data can help with emergency data recovery.