hi alli have a compaq Presario SR1839UK with a 300gb hard drive which crashed on me i have just ordered new hard drive 3 Western Digital 2*500gb and 1*320gb my question is is it possible to add the 3 hard drives to this pc and if so how do i do it and do i need to buy more fans? thank you
i doubt you'll have space for all three. most prebuilts can only handle two hdd's. if they're all sata, then just plug them in. the motherboard will have three empty sata ports, and the power supply should have a few sata connectors left.
If you don't have room for all 3 drives you could slap one in an external enclosure and be able to take it with you if needed. I doubt it, but it can never hurt to have more air flow keeping things cool.
As long as you have the room in your case to install the hard drives you can put in as many as well fit. If you run out of sata/ide ports, you can add a PCI addon card with extra hard drive ports. Also you need a good size power supply at least 350 watts at the minimum. I have 4 X 500gb hard drives installed on my media PC. My computer runs 24/7 with all 4 hard drives with no problems. But you do need to have hard drive fans on each hard drive (attaches to bottom of drive), or have case fan blowing on each hard drive. A single case fan won't keep all the drives cool, it will only cool the one it's blowing on. A fan will drop 10 degrees off the temperature, I like to keep them at 45 celcius. Fans will definitely increase the life of your hard drives.
You can use any case fan you have laying around, sometimes a 120mm fan can blow on 2 hard drives. I always have at least 1 inch seperation between hard drives, otherwise one hard drive will be heating up the one next to it. The ones you attach to the bottom of the hard drives cost about 10 dollars, but they take up a lot of space, I use those on computers where I only have 2 hard drives or the hard drive is in a area where I can't get a case fan attached. The important thing is to make sure they have air blowing on them all the time. Just make sure to stay away from the very large case fans (above 120mm) because those can be very loud. The 80mm and 120mm work well and don't make that much noise. But in the end I would rather deal with the noise than run a hard drive with no cooling.
