Page 1 of External 3.5" Hard Disk Drive Help

A mate of mine got himself a second hard disk drive (160GB). When I tried to fit it for him over the weekend I discovered that his Dell Dimension 2350 case will not take a second drive, no bay, no provision on ribbon cable >:(

Phoned Dell this morning & they confirmed that you can`t add a second internal drive. They said I need to connect it via USB2 with an external drive enclosure.

Anyway, the point of my post (other than to slag off Dell for providing such a non-upgradeable PC) is where can I get one of these from at a good price.

Thanks in advance

Sam.

Try maplins

There are loads of places that sell them for about £30-£40. Where exactly is another matter (I`ll look later if I remember)

Don`t know if this is a good price or not, as i`ve never looked at them much, but there is one at SVP here

try look at aria


cokie enjoy

I know this might sound a bit way off, but it might be cheaper and simpler to buy a new case and a standard ribbon cable and do a major swapout. Of course that`s provided the Dell has a standard motherboard.

UPDATE: After checking out SVP, I`d second pat-w`s suggestion. That 3.5" external kit looks just the job.

J Mark Oates

This item was edited on Tuesday, 30th March 2004, 23:36

Could be a blessing in disguise.

Those external hard drives are great - you can transfer huge files from one computer to another without burning cds etc. Very useful as a backup drive.

I used to have a dell optiplex that was only designed to take one hard disc. I just got a couple of adapters for the power cables, some new IDE cables and an extra fan and ended up with 3 hard discs in there. As my pc never moved I just placed them on top of each other, with some spacers between them to keep the airflow moving on them, then used a bit of gaffa tape to hold them in place.

This worked fine for 3 years until I got my new PC. The dell is still working fine with this set up.

ebuyer.co.uk or maplins probably do them

to be honest thats why alot of people build them from scratch..upgradability...you dont necessarily save alot although 5-6 years you could easily save 50% like i did...now its more like 20% if you`re lucky.

I think with Dell you have to buy their..costly..memory as well...

As others have mentioned the Aldi PC is a good spec..not sure whether the ATI graphics card is a hybrid though as never of the model number, 9800 XXL - unless its a misprint

Stop with the Dell bashing!

Many of their systems are built with workstation use in mind, where they don`t need the extra space on the disk - it makes sense to build a system in a smaller case in this situation.

They sell plenty of PCs in larger cases which will easily accomodate a few drives - our Dell machine could quite easily fit 4 hard disks in if I needed them.

I`m not aware of the memory thing - what`s so special about their memory that means you have to buy it from them?