Hard Drive Question

[Compass Call]

I want to upgrade the size of hard drive in my PC but I am not sure how big I can go.
The mother board is a Mercury BXe98-ATX with a Pentium 3 500Mhz processor and 384mb memory. The current hard drive is a Fujitsu MPE3102AT (10Gb) with Windows ME installed.
The manual I have gives no indication of hard drive type or max size the board will run. I have looked on the web but with no luck.
I would like to fit an 80Gb or 120Gb drive as a slave to accomodate large files (photos) and keep the 10Gb drive to run the OS.
I would appreciate any advice you specialists out there can give me.

Thanks in advance.

CC

[Engineer]

Upgrade to Win XP will solve all your problems

[Compass Call]

Engineer

Thanks for that, but perhaps I have posed my question badly.

1) Will my motherboard support a hard drive of 80 - 120 Gb?

2) If so what type of drive should I get?

I have been told that there are different types of hard drive. E.G. UDMA 100, UDMA 133, SATA 100, 5400/7200RPM. Also which manufacturer is recommended for best value.

As Engineer said, I should upgrade to Windows XP as well, since it is about half price if you buy an OEM version!

CC

[Titan Driver]

My advice is

Don't do the upgrade to win xp from 98! Get the full version.

In my case I had nothing but problems with the upgrade version. Ended up buying the full OEM and the problems went away. :)

[Saab Dastard]

CC,

I had the opportunity of upgrading a range of Compaq PCs with 10 GB disks in the PIII 450-600 MHz range, so probably of the same vintage as yours.

I found that 60 GB was the largest drive that could be accomodated by the systems.

While not saying that you can't fit a drive larger than these (especially if you can update the BIOS to a recent version), I would be cautious about > 60, though 80 might not be a problem.

I left the original 10 GB disk in as the system disk and added a 40 or 60 GB disk as the Data disk - obviously you need to have space, power, connections sufficient to do this.

An alternative would be to add a SCSI card and then you are no longer limited by the IDE restrictions.

As regards the type of drive, you can use any drive that supports an IDE interface. The speed of the interface will be limited by what your PC supports, not what the drive is capable of. That said, the faster the drive spins the lower the seek time, so you may as well go for a drive with a high rpm.

There's some useful info on interfaces here (http://www.computerhope.com/help/ide.htm)

HTH

SD

[Engineer]

SD

Think I have seen this prob before but on a compaq laptop tried to install a 20G HDD system would not see it Problem was with an out dated BIOS once upgraded bingo system worked a treat

CC

Looked on the web for the MB you showed cant find Mercury version only a ZIDE version maybe you could look at the web sites on that.

2 types of drive in use 2day ATA or SATA one uses parallel the other serial data transfer

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Compass Call,

Your motherboard might handle an 80 to 120Gb drive with the Lastest BIOS (http://www.vctboard.com/eng/dwnld/bios.htm) and if not, then get a PCI IDE Controller Card for the Hard Drive.

Take Care.

Rochard

[Mac the Knife]

"Upgrade to Win XP will solve all your problems"....

Any version of XP will run like a dog on an old system like this - "..Pentium 3 500Mhz processor and 384mb memory.." - no matter how much memory you have. Don't.

If you're happy with the system and just need more storage space just put in a 40-60GB drive as slave - with this mobo you won't notice much difference between 7200 and 5400 rpm.

[PretoriaSillyperson]

Once you have more than one IDE drive you can increase the Virtual Memory (Page File) on both disks to increase the overall speed of the PC - takes 2 minutes and works wonders.

RAID isn't supported natively by XP and even Server 2003 only allows for 0, 1 and 5.

PSP

[Compass Call]

Thanks for your advice folks:ok:

I will now approach "She Who Must Be Obeyed" and ask her to untie the purse strings.:E

CC