A friend of mine recently bought a new harddrive to replace her old one which crashed a while back. Unfortunately (from what I can gather) her motherboard appears to be old and has an IDE connector for the harddrive. I think she's using a Dell desktop that's probably about 7-8 years old. This is the hard drive she ordered: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...2136098&Tpk=WD3200AAJS
So since the harddrive obviously won't plug in, a few solutions occur to me.
A) Find another use for the drive she ordered, and buy an IDE drive as a replacement.
B) Buy an adapter.
C) Replace parts or build a new computer that can properly use the SATA drive.
Are there other options that I should consider that I am missing? Any advice on which of these is the best choice?
Some follow up questions:
1) What type of drives are likely to work for such an old computer and how can I help her make sure she orders a drive that will work? I scanned Newegg for IDE drives and saw some "Ultra IDE", but I am not really sure if or how this is different from regular IDE.
2) If buying an adapter is a good solution, could anyone recommend to me one that would work well for this specific task, or at least give me some idea what I need to look for? What do I need to make sure this solution will work? So far looking into this it appears that the converters need to be plugged into the power supply.
3) Keeping in mind the age of this machine, are there other problems she should be looking out for that might crop up in replacing this harddrive? I believe she would prefer to avoid spending the money to build a new machine, but I am not really familiar enough with 8-year old computer standards to know what other problems we might be facing with that sort of hardware. I'd love any heads-up.
Thanks very much for your advice and expertise.
So since the harddrive obviously won't plug in, a few solutions occur to me.
A) Find another use for the drive she ordered, and buy an IDE drive as a replacement.
B) Buy an adapter.
C) Replace parts or build a new computer that can properly use the SATA drive.
Are there other options that I should consider that I am missing? Any advice on which of these is the best choice?
Some follow up questions:
1) What type of drives are likely to work for such an old computer and how can I help her make sure she orders a drive that will work? I scanned Newegg for IDE drives and saw some "Ultra IDE", but I am not really sure if or how this is different from regular IDE.
2) If buying an adapter is a good solution, could anyone recommend to me one that would work well for this specific task, or at least give me some idea what I need to look for? What do I need to make sure this solution will work? So far looking into this it appears that the converters need to be plugged into the power supply.
3) Keeping in mind the age of this machine, are there other problems she should be looking out for that might crop up in replacing this harddrive? I believe she would prefer to avoid spending the money to build a new machine, but I am not really familiar enough with 8-year old computer standards to know what other problems we might be facing with that sort of hardware. I'd love any heads-up.
Thanks very much for your advice and expertise.