Second hard drive: Part 2

[Phillip Mills]

I'm still trying to get enough information to feel comfortable about 
sticking a second hard drive in my PC with some hope of it working.

The machine is a Dell XPS B733: Pentium 3, about 3 or 4 years old.  I 
went shopping yesterday and the first person I talked to who sounded 
knowledgeable said that a current 40GB drive would *probably* work, but 
larger ones might not be recognized by the IDE controller.  My user 
manual says the Dell uses ATA-33 (which I assume matches the 33Mhz PCI 
bus speed), while current drives all refer to ATA-133.  The 
salesperson's not-very-reassuring comment was that the 133 drives 
should be backward compatible to 100...and then I started wondering 
whether he was talking about RAM speeds instead.

So, as usual, the more I think about PC hardware, the more confused I 
become.  I used to run Linux on one of my Macs and I'm having trouble 
remembering why I switched.  Oh, ya...someone gave me a free Intel box! 
  :-)

Anyone willing to share some relevant facts?

........................
Phillip Mills
Multi-platform software development
(416) 224-0714

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