Installing your peripherals

If you're like me and got system building experience from upgrading an old machine, then you probably know what to do from here. However, if you haven't had the experience of several upgrades, then read on!

Your various peripherals

Chances are that you'll be wanting an optical drive, a floppy drive, and a hard drive in your build.

Optical drive

An optical drive (CD-ROM / DVD-ROM / Burner) is a simple yet very important part of your computer. Basically, the back looks like this:


and is generally connected by an IDE cable.


There are special drives connected by SATA cables, but those are hideously expensive. However, SATA does come with a distinct advantage- no jumper settings to worry about. Remember to tell your optical drive exactly what it's going to do through the jumpers. Refer to the top of the drive, the manual, or the manufacturer for proper installation instructions. If you don't set the jumpers on your drive, your drive will get very confused and your system will not boot. Generally, jumper settings will tell your drive if it is a...

• Master. A master drive is at the top of the round IDE cable, and is the first drive accessed in BIOS or whatever operating system you use.
• Slave. A slave drive is operational, however takes second priority to the master drive in BIOS or your operating system.
• Cable Select. This allows your IDE cable to decide what role your drive plays. This makes things alot simpler for you, but may cause some delay in BIOS when it detects your drive. Also it requires a special cable and that both drives are set to the cable select setting. In general it is easier to use Master/Slave.

Once that is all taken care of, installation is simple. Note- my case uses tool-less installation and will look different than yours. Take the front panel off of your case, as indicated in the case manual, take off whatever EMI shields stand in your way, and slide the drive in until the screwholes in the drive line up with the screwholes in the case. Secure the drive using screws. Then take the IDE cable, attach one end to the optical drive, and attach the other to the motherboard.

Floppy Drive

Floppy drives are positively ancient, and have little use in the age of flash drives and iPods. However, when you need to flash your video card's BIOS, install SATA drivers, or just do advanced system functions, a floppy drive comes in very useful.

To install, do the same procedure as you would for an optical drive, but remember to use the smaller 3.5" floppy drive bays. Then take the floppy drive cable, which looks like a thin version of the IDE cable. Attach one end to the floppy drive, and plug the other end to the motherboard. Floppy drives are slightly more complicated then IDE drives when it comes to wiring them, because the design will let you get away with inserting the cable upside down. While the cable on the floppy drive won't fit if you put it upside down, the motherboard will not bug you about it. You will know that you have the floppy drive cable upside down if the floppy drive activity light is always on. Please note that if the cable is reversed and the drive is powered on it will erase a floppy if you left one in the drive.

Hard Drive

The hard drive is one of the most complicated peripherals you will ever use. It is either in SATA (Serial ATA), SATA2 (SATA-II) or IDE (ATA / EIDE).


As you can see, SATA is alot smaller and easier to deal with than IDE, since the cable is a bit more fragile try to avoid very tight bends. SATA and SATA2 are almost exactly alike. For an SATA drive, you rarely have to worry about jumper settings. On an SATA2 drive, refer to the drive's manual to ensure that the drive isn't set to run at 1.5Gb/s. For an IDE drive, the IDE jumper rules apply for hard drives. However, hard drives are very senstive pieces of hardware. Please take note of the following tips when dealing with hard drives.

• NEVER handle by the bottom, and try to avoid handling by the top. Doing so may mess up the motor, and a dead motor means a dead hard drive. Handle a hard drive by the sides only.
• NEVER EVER handle a hard drive while it is on. Bumping it WILL cause temporary drive failiure, and if you are lucky, you can reset the drive by restarting the sytem. You can kill a hard drive by bumping it while it is on.
• NEVER EVER plug in a harddrive power plug while the system running.
• When you have a SATA drive with "legacy" power options like mine, you have the option to power the drive using either the four pin molex connector, or the new SATA power connector. Those both will be explained later in this guide. While you can power the drive using one or the other connector, You cannot use both.

To install, you do not need to take off the front panel. Carefully slide the drive into the internal 3.5" hard drive bay, and secure it using screws. As long as the drive is secure, the amount of screws do not matter. Remember to connect the cable from the motherboard to the drive.

CHECKPOINT!

Good job, you have successfully inserted your drives and connected them to the motherboard. However, your computer is not quite ready for its first run yet. The devices need to have power!


If your motherboard's cables look somewhat like this, read on, and find out how to connect everything to your power supply.