It’s that time of year again, we’ve all gotten fatter, rolled around in hoards of paper and sung ridiculous carols far out of pitch.
All that remains it to spend that hard-gifted cash on exciting new tech, or setup the hardware on your list given to you by the braver technophobes of your family.
First off, in what will hopefully encompass a great range of How-To’s, I’ll be explaining in full pictorial form how to install your latest SATA HDD. Brilliant for storing all those new games you got, or downloading the from Steam with all that new-found cash. Or for storing endless legal movies, given by generous friends and family.
Click the read on to expand the realms of your PC’s storage…So you want to install a new SATA Hard Drive, eh? Ok, luckily for you, it’s really simple. But just to be sure, and for those of you experiencing your first time insidethe “scary tangled mess” that is the inards of your PC, I’ll go through step by step, and with nice pictures too. Aren’t I nice.
Safety first I was always taught, and it doesn’t seem too bad a motto. Get yourself a nice open space, avoiding clutter and stress. Unplug everything from your PC, lie it down in this space, and then plug the power cord back in, and then plug it into the wall socket.
Make sure it is turned off at the wall, and off at the back of your PC. “Why am I leaving it in?!” I hear you cry, the reason is simple. Earthing. You know the top prong of the UK spec wall plug? That’s the earth connection, or ground. By leaving it in, even when off you’re still connected to earth. Which means that as long as you are touching the PC chassis, even if you do get electrocuted (Try not to..) then the current has a direct path to earth, an you won’t be zapped comic-book style.
Once you’re happy it’s correctly aligned, go ahead and screw it in place. There’s no real need for four screws, you can if you want but all my HDD’s only have two – purely because Asus didn’t give me many!! There’s no problem with that, they’re only there to hold it steady, so two diagonally opposite each other will do fine.
When that’s done, you’re ready to pop it inside your case, which will look something like this:
With the hard drive in place, take a look at the connections. You should see a long “L” shape connector, a shorter “L” connector, and four pins poking out.
The longer “L” is used to power the drive, the shorter “L” is the SATA connection, which communicates with the motherboard in order to read/write data; and the four pins are jumper pins – you don’t need to worry about those. If there’s a jumper cap there, leave it where it is, if not, don’t fret either, your model won’t require one.
So, you need a female “long L” connector, to power the new drive. There may be one already attached to your PSU, or if not, you can use an adapter like I did, to convert one of the many four pin Molex’s on your PSU to a “long L”.
This, in turn, can then be plugged into your newly fitted HDD:
Then, you need to simply plug a “short L” SATA cable from the HDD:
Down to the motherboard:
On my motherboard, the 6 SATA sockets are located face up in the bottom right hand corner. However, it is also common for them to be anywhere on the right-hand side, parallel to the PCB.
Congratulations! You (should) have now successfully installed a brand spanking new SATA HDD to your PC. May the disk-filling commence.
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