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hard Drive replacement?
I have a 3 year old Gateway desktop with a 320gb hard drive how big a harddrive can I put in & how do I know if my pc supports sata or IDE I do not know how to tell
{Please help
3 Answers
- 10 years ago
Okay i'm 99.9% sure your computer supports SATA. But just be on the safe side you should check. There are a number of ways but the simplest way is to just open the computer and look at the hard drive. If there is a thick cable that looks like this:
http://images3.souq.com/uploaded/310511/09a53ba93e...
it's IDE. If the cable looks like this:
http://bigbytepc.net/images/sata.jpg
it's SATA. Typically you'll only get to upwards of 700-750 GB with IDE. You can get up to 2 TB (terabytes) with SATA.
Source(s): Computer Technician - 10 years ago
The easiest way (to me) would be to open your computer up, and see what is connected to your hard drive.
If it's a huge ribbon like thing, it's an IDE. If it's a thin, flat cable, it's a SATA.
Hope I've helped.
Source(s): CS major. Built my own computer from scratch.
