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Replacing IDE HardDrive on Gateway PC

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by jkatz

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I have two Gateway GP5-200 (200Mhz) - running Win 95B, PC's here with dead 2GB hard drives. I'd like to replace the hard drives with two small (10GB - relatively small by today's stanards), hard drives.

In Gateway's documentation, the existing bad hard drives are described as the following:

HDD IDE WDG 2.0GB UATA R0

I am reading that as being a Western Digital IDE (not EIDE), and Ultra ATA (probably 66 not 100 I would imagine).

Now when I go to order the new hard drives, I expect I won't find IDE any longer, but in it's place EIDE and probably Ultra ATA 100 - would my existing hardware / cables support the newer type of drive or do I have to install a seperate / newer EIDE controller card? And any other insight anyone can provide would be helpful.

7 replies

by don christner

Your biggest problem will be whether your BIOS supports that big of a harddrive. However, even if your BIOS does not support it, most HD manufacturers have software that will allow you to use all of it's capacity.

Your present hardware will work with the newer drive. However, it will only operate at the speed of your present hardware.

Don

by jkatz

Not a big deal about the BIOS - even if it doesn't recognize the full 10GB, all I really ultimately need is a few GB of it as these workstations will be the equivelant of dumb terminals running Oracle forms and the such. No heavy duty storage is needed.

by mr_joey

I would say that if you still wanted an Ultra ATA 66 HDD you would be able to find one. I know that samsung makes an ATA 66 as well as an ATA 100. You probably won't have great luck with the Samsung Brand but if they still make one I'm sure Western Digital will as well.

As far as you IDE Cable, that should be fine. I think that if those PC's are 500MHz you won't need to do a bios upgrade, it should aut recognize a 10 GB HDD.

Good Luck!

by freetech

first of all, a 200mhz computer is likely to have an ultra ata-33(udma33) at best. any ide drive sold today will be compatible, but the old hardware will just sloww the available transfer speeds. you will be better off using the cables that are present in your system now, though any newer cables will likely work.
as for the operating system(win95b) and the hardware(gateway), even if the system recognizes the harddrives at full capacity, win95b has problems working with partitions over 8GB's. your best bet is to divide the drives into smaller partitions which is a hassle maybe but will save you grief later on.
last tip. get drives with 7200rpm drive speeds. that'll help with seek times and quickness.
read the instructions and/or check out the mfr's website for help.
hope this helps and good luck.

by jkatz

Personally, we don't worry about quickness with these old workstations as these will mainly be acting as dumb terminals for an Oracle application - or for that matter storage as the workstation will mainly only have Win 95, Oracle browser, possibly MS Office 97' and a few miscellaneous applications. Just need to get some storage avaliable on the machines - even if that mean I won't see all the space that the drive offers.

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