Assembly Process: Step 4 - Installing the Hard Drive

Installing the Hard Drive

Now we’ll make our first addition to this setup; we’ll install the hard drive. For this step we will need:

The hard drive
The IDE cable from the motherboard box
2 hard drive screws from the bag of screws that came with the case (short with a round edge), and
The trusty screwdriver

First, we’ll check the back of the hard drive to ensure the jumper is set correctly. Since we will be connecting two devices (the hard drive and the optical drive) with the same IDE cable, one device must be set to master and the other to slave. Since the hard drive is the more important of the two (requires higher transfer speeds), we will set it to be the master drive with a slave present on the same cable. According to the jumper diagrams on the label of the drive, we will need to set the jumper vertically to connect the two middle pins.

Since it is the master drive, it will need to connect to the first IDE connector. On a typical IDE cable, there will be 3 connectors. The two that are closer together are for devices and the connector by itself at the longer end is to the motherboard. Of the two connectors for devices, the one at the top of the cable is for the primary or master drive, and the connector in the middle is for the secondary or slave drive. If you are only connecting a single drive on a cable like this, simply use the master connector and don’t connect anything to the secondary.

To physically install the hard drive, we will need to slide it into the desired bay and secure it by screwing it in. Since there’s only a little distance between the primary and secondary connectors on the IDE cable, I want to install it towards the top of the rack, closer towards where I’ll be installing the optical drive. I’m going to install it in the second bay down for ventilation purposes so that air can circulate around it, but it can still be close to the optical drive bays. Slide the drive straight into the bay, and tighten it down with 2 screws. If your computer will be transported frequently, I would be inclined to screw down the other side of the hard drive by first removing the other side panel from the case, then inserting the screws.

We now need to connect the drive to the motherboard and to the power supply. The IDE cable can be attached only one direction thanks to a keyed pin. Attach the cable by lining up the pins and pushing firmly. We then attach a 4-pin Molex connector from the power supply in the same manner to the appropriate (large) pins on the right-hand side of the drive. The power connector is keyed by angled corners at the top and square corners at the bottom, so it only fits in one direction. It doesn’t matter which 4-pin Molex power connector you use (there are 4 available in this case) since they will all do the same job.

The hard drive is now installed and we can move on to the final piece of our puzzle.