Dell dimentions 4500s

[kc8pcl]

Hi All,
I am looking to find any information about adding a sata drive to this computer. I have a 200 gig seagate sata, can this be done? where on the mother board do I look to add the sata drive cable? any help with this will be greatly appreciated. thanks for reading this post. my email address is - kc8pcl@yahoo.com

 

[o1die]

Pricewatch has a controller card section. Click on the sata ii. Microbarn has 2 sata cards listed. One has an external sata port for external hardrives. The second card for $19.48 has 2 sata ports on the card for internal hardrives. All you need is an open white pci slot on your motherboard for the card. To install the drive, you'll need an open 3.5 or 5 1/4 inch slot on the racks inside the case if your drive is internal. The 3.5 slot will fit without any adapters; just use 4 screws to mount it in the open bay and use a 4 pin to sata adapter if needed to connect the power supply lead to the hardrive. The 5 1/4 inch slot requires extra adapters to mount the drive, but will work. After mounting the drive in the case and connecting the power supply lead, plug in a sata cable on the drive and attatch it to the adapter card.

 

[o1die]

You may also have to load a device driver for the sata card, but if running vista, it should find a driver for it. Windows xp may require you to install the driver off a cd that should come with the card. Your old dell board has no sata ports that I could find.