New Hard Drives

[AlphaBravo]

we hav just upgraded our ram from 120mb to 632mb. but would now like to get a new hard drive to upgrade from a 35Gb one .  do hard drives hav to be compatible with your mother board? and if so how do u find out if they are? our mother board is : MSI (MicroStar) MS-6378 (KLE133)

All help would be apriciated as i dont hav a clue about this

Thanks


Craig

[Jared]

To answer your first question,

1.) Hard drives do have to be compatible with your motherboard, but only to a slight extent.  Meaning you don't have to buy a particular brand or a specific model number, etc.

However without flashing your bios which to some is considered risky, you may not be able to put a 300GB hard drive, ie you may be limited to your motherboards bios settings code and how it percieves different sizes of drives.  

Going to the product manufacturers web-site you can find out what the max speed and size limit of a new hard drive can be.  Unfortunately I cannot get the web-site to work for me without locking up and sendng me error messages tonight so I can't tell you what your size caps out at as far as max GB allowed by current revision of bios that comes installed on the pc as original.

I CAN however tell you that you will need a ATA 100 Drive to be compatible with the motherboard. There are ways of upgrading from ATA 100 to ATA133, or even the serial drives which are amazingly fast, this typically involves buying a pci slot card to install in pc.

the following site usually has a decent selection:

Http://www/tigerdirect.com

hard drives can be found here:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... ?CatId=134
when looking, be sure to look for one with an interface that is ATA-100 type if you do not wish to upgrade to a faster ide bus speed. (ATA-100 should be fine).

pending any sphysical size restrictions from the motherboard bios you should be quite fine then! :-)

Hope this helped ore than it confused!

Jared