[Woch2331]

I purchased a new Seagate 500 GB IDE hard drive from Newegg along with an Acomdata external case to help with file storage. The problem is that I can't get the case to recognize the 500 GB drive. I've been working with Acomdata support and nothing they've suggested works. I then put an old 60 GB drive that I had in the case and it works! I decided to add the 500 GB on the internal cable in my HP Pavilion a420n. Again, it's not recognized. I swapped it out with the older 60 GB one and that works just fine. I've tried all the jumper settings, made sure the cable are secure and nothing seems to work. I'm about ready to just order a Western Digital drive and see how that performs. Any thoughts, suggestions or advice?

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You'll probably find due to the age of this computer it doesn't support hard drives over a certain size.
According to HP it came with a 160Gb drive initially which means if that's correct then theoretically your machine should be able to see any size drive up to 144 Petabytes. In reality though, you'll probably find it's limit is well below the one terabyte that point which in your case seems to be between 160Gb and 500Gb. Probably around 300Gb would be a rough guesstimate.

To put things into perspective with a simplified example, however the true figure is higher:

1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte.
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte.

Edited by Neil Jones, 09 March 2008 - 03:59 PM.

[Neil Jones]

You'll probably find due to the age of this computer it doesn't support hard drives over a certain size.
According to HP it came with a 160Gb drive initially which means if that's correct then theoretically your machine should be able to see any size drive up to 144 Petabytes. In reality though, you'll probably find it's limit is well below the one terabyte that point which in your case seems to be between 160Gb and 500Gb. Probably around 300Gb would be a rough guesstimate.

To put things into perspective with a simplified example, however the true figure is higher:

1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte.
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte.

Edited by Neil Jones, 09 March 2008 - 03:59 PM.