Personal computers (PC's) have this insatiable appetite for storage space, either memory space or hard disk space. My computer is hardly six (6) months old but it has crunched on all of its memory space and hard disk storage space, resulting in a degraded performance.

It is now running slower than it used to be.

As we install more softwares on our computers, especially the newer versions that keep on increasing their hard disk space requirements, the faster the disk storage space is eaten away.

Hard disks are inexpensive nowadays.  So, the normal solution to the problem of hard disk storage space is to add another hard disk.

The easiest way to install an additional hard drive is to use an external drive. External drives usually use the USB interface. With external USB disk drives, there is no need to open the computer case to install it. You just plug the drive into the USB port, either in the front USB port or the port located at the back of the computer case.

Another option for an additional hard drive is by using internal drives. With this drives, you need to open the case of the computer and install the hard drive. The hard drive needs to be held in place inside the computer case by screws.

There are two types of internal drives that are currently popular. One of them is the newer SATA drive and the other older type is called an IDE drive. Each one has its own set of data cable and power cable.

If your computer contains a new motherboard, it's more likely that it has a couple of free, unused SATA ports. Installing a SATA hard disk is more straight forward than an IDE drive. With SATA drives, you just fix the drive on a vacant slot on the drive bays inside the computer case. You then connect the SATA cable from the hard disk to the motherboard SATA port and the SATA power cable is plugged into the power supply.

The more challenging hard drives to install are internal drives that use the old IDE interface. Actually it is also as straight-forward as the SATA drive provided you have a vacant IDE slot on the motherboard. The reason for this is that you don't need to worry about jumpers.

On computers with limited IDE ports, and the IDE ports are already being used by other hard drives or CD/DVD drives, you will need to deal with setting the jumpers on the drive.

In this instance, you need to have the additional hard drive being installed share the IDE port being used by another hard disk. IDE cables have two connectors for connecting to either another hard disk or another CD/DVD drive.

Since you would be sharing the cable with another hard disk, you need to set the jumper on the first disk to the "Master" position and the new, additional drive's jumper would need to be set to "Slave".

The reason for this Master/Slave jumper is that, since the two drives are using the same data cable, the computer must have a way of diffentiating between the two connected drives. Improper setting of these jumpers will cause the system BIOS unable to detect both of the drives. It's either the BIOS will see only one of them, or, in some cases, both drives won't be recognized at all.