If you alredy have a Sata drive it means your MB suports them, so just go and buy another one. If its just a regular 'storage' drive, you should look for a 7.200 RPM - SATA II drive. As for brand, anyone should be fine, I like Seagate and Western Digital. As far as size goes, I think the 1TB ones have very good prices nowadays.

Now if you are looking for performance, Westend digital has some disks at 10.000RPM and than there is the SSD drives, but they are much more expensive and have much less storage capacity. If you don´t know this drives you problably don´t need them, stick with the SATA II models and you should be fine.

The instalation is rathr simples, you just have to plug 2 cables (power and sata) one to the PSU and the other to the MB. You may have to format the drive once installed, but thats not hard either. If you need any help, we are here to help.

Cheers.

Another thing to remember when installing a new drive....... They have little plastic plugs on the back called "Jumpers", and they have to be set in accordance to whether you want the drive to be a "Master" or "Slave"...... Master is usually the drive with the OS on it. Just be careful you get them in the right position. You can usually find instructions and diagrams for setting the jumpers on the drive manufacturers website, and sometimes on the drive itself.........

I only see one sata cable hookup. But I'll just replace existing hard drive since it's pretty old and(weird noises) & only 320gb's. The new one is a western digital 1 tb serial ata drive..New corsair 550w power supply. Since I'm updating to Windows 7 I'll just replace the old one before installing it.. Also back up...Thanks guys..

Western Digital does make some of the best hard drives out there.

If you want to use this as your main drive, I recommend you get the faster Western Digital Black. If you're going to use this as a secondary drive to store your movies/music/photos/extra files that just don't fit anywhere else, you can save yourself a buck or two and get the Western Digital 1TB Green because it is a lot less expensive, and it uses less power, generates less heat. These are desirable features on a secondary hard drive.

If you want pure speed, the Western Digital Velociraptor is amazing, at 10000RPM, it makes even the most unruly application very snappy.

When installing hard drives remember to keep plenty of space above and below the hard drive and ensure proper air flow around the drive. Improper ventilation causes overheating, and that's one of the biggest factors that contribute to hard drive failures and very easily avoidable.

the only reasons against do this that I can see are

1 voiding warranty.

2 external drives are more expensive than internals

3 external drives from wd are usually the green drives for the heat reason and the usb being slow the slow drive will not make any difference in performance

harpo

Thanks guys..

Each serial channel has a number associated with it, so just set the right HD to boot in the BIOS, and you'll be good to go!

Cool.... thanks guys!

What's the model number of your motherboard or can you take a picture and post it?

And I thought he was talking about the ones on his motherboard.