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Build Your First PC – Part 4 Driving Ambitions There are two basic types of hard drive, SCSI and IDE. SCSI was always the fastest by quite a margin but these days the difference is less clear cut and with cheap IDE RAID systems the differences can be marginal. Additionally, a modern IDE drive is so quick anyway that it doesn’t really matter that much unless you have a particular need for very high data bandwidth such as video editing or audio production. As I’m putting together a generic PC, IDE is more than sufficient so I’ll concentrate on that. All motherboards sport at least two IDE connectors or channels and each connector supports a master and slave drive giving a total of four IDE devices. These can be hard drives, CD-ROM drives, CD Burners and so on. The only rule is that each of the IDE channels must have a Master drive i.e. you cannot have a slave only on the cable. Hard drive The hard drive I’m using is a 40Gb Seagate Barracuda IV. This drive is awesomely fast but despite this manages to be extremely quiet in operation. The only real hiccup is that as a 7200RPM drive, it does run rather hot and you might want to consider an extra case fan to keep it cool if you’re going to be putting additional drives around it. The Antec has a space ready and waiting for such a fan. As this is the only hard drive in the PC we can get away without an extra fan especially as the case already has a 2nd fan elsewhere. The Barracuda IV also has various built in systems to protect the drive and data as well as S.M.A.R.T. monitoring to allow your PC to detect impending failure. All in all a fast, solid drive. It also looks quite sexy too with a nice shiny finish. You can clearly see the extra padding that helps keep it so quiet too. At one time it was a bad idea to put a hard drive and CD-ROM on the same IDE channel as the CD-ROM could slow down the hard drive. These days technology has moved on and it isn’t an issue so we’ll set the Seagate up as the master and the CD-ROM drive as the slave. This is done via small jumpers at the rear of the drives. It is about now you are going to appreciate buying a good case. Fitting the drives can be fiddly as you have to manoeuvre them around and in to the drive cages before screwing them in to place. Fitting one isn’t too bad but if you’re trying to shoehorn two or three it can get rather fraught. The Antec case happily has removable drive cages which have a quick release lever that lets you lift the whole cage out. The drive can then be put in and screwed in to place before clipping the cage back in. Nice and easy.
CD-ROM At the beginning of the series I noted that one of the advantages of building PCs is you often end up with a pile of spare parts as you upgrade. As CD-ROM drives only tend to get used to install software, I’m not 100% convinced that you need the latest and fastest model so I’m going to recycle a 24 speed drive I had lying about. That saved a few quid! Unlike hard drives, CD-ROM drives need access to the outside world so we need to open a hole at the front of the case. Firstly, the plastic blanking plate needs to be popped out. Behind that is a metal sheet that forms part of the case. This too needs to be removed. They are usually made such that a few twists back and forth will make it snap off. This can be seen here.
With this case, CD-ROM drives etc need to have rails fitted to them to allow easy removal and fitting so first these need to be screwed on to the CD-ROM drive. Once done, the drive is easily slipped in to the case and locked in to position.
Now we can cable them up. Both drives will need to have power cables attached and you’ll see plenty of spare ones attached to the case’s PSU. Plug them in. Try to find two on the same cable to make life easier. Like nearly all parts in a PC, they are gated and will only fit the right way. IDE cables have three connectors, one for the motherboard and two for the drives. The cable needs to be connected so that one end plugs in to the first IDE connector on the motherboard (usually called IDE0) and then the two drives are attached to the other connectors. Again, they can only (usually!) go in one way round. Floppy Drive The floppy drive has its own connector on the motherboard and matching lead. You can easily spot the lead as it has a twist in part of the cable at one end. This is to ensure backwards compatibility whilst allowing you to fit a second floppy drive if needed. You plug one end in to the motherboard and then plug the connector that is after the twist in the cable in to the floppy drive. Finally, plug in the power lead which is a smaller connector than the other drives and is probably the only small one available. If you’re lucky, there will be a single branch of power cabling with the right connectors for both hard disk, CD-ROM and floppy drive on it. That’s all for this part. In part 5 I’ll be adding the graphics card and tidying up before starting to install Windows.
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