Hard Drive upgrade.

[BennyWong]

Hi All,
I currently have a Asus P3V4x motherboard with a Fujitsu
10gb hard drive running at 5400rpm. My question is I want to
upgrade my hard drive to a Maxtor 80gb or greater with the 7200 rpm. Will any of the Maxtor 7200 rpm work with my existing configuration or do I have to get the Maxtor with the 5400 rpm? Thanks for your response in advance. Happy New Year!!!

 

[wolluf]

The 7200 will be fine.

 

[BennyWong]

Hello wolluf,
Thanks for responding. So all I have to do is buy the
Maxtor 80gb or higher capacity drive at 7200rpm and plug the existing data cable and power plug and do the formatting/partitioning? I heard from other sources saying about the data cable needs to be changed and the BIOS needs to be updated or ?? I'll try your suggestion. Happy New Year!

 

[wolluf]

Yes, you will need to change the IDE cable assuming the current drive is connecting at ATA33 and new one will be ATA100 or 133. You'll need an 80 pin cable (your motherboard does support this cable type - not sure if it will support faster than ATA66 though - this isn't a problem, but means the data transfer rate will be restricted to the motherboard's limit. There may be bios upgrade available to improve the motherboard's interface speed) - this is nothing to do with 5400/7200 rpm by the way.

 

[paparazi]

Bennywong,
It is likely that your 10gig Fijitsu Harddrive is ATA 66 so is already connected with a 80core "ultra"IDE cable (the differance between the two cable types is the courser flat ribbon cable on the slower type) ATA66 or above hard drives require the finer 80 core cable.
fdisk first! then format second. Martin
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