looking to add another internal hard drive

Would i need to upgrade my psu if i added another internal 1 tb hard drive ?

I think my psu is 300 watts ( though it might be 250). i haven't really bothered to upgrade it much since its mostly used for web,email and other minor things at the moment, though the hard drive is almost filled up.

This is what its running:
win7 ( 64 bit home premium)
2 gb ddr3
500 gb seagate HD
intel I3 proceesor ( 3.06 ghz)

If i added another internal hard drive would it take too much power? I am not sure exactly how much a hard drive drains off the psu but maybe its not more than 10 watts?

Can someone recommend me a good hard drive to buy ( under $90) anywhere from 1-1.5 tb.

Also if i added another hard drive, 4 gb of memory and a mediocre videocard i would assume then i would need a new psu for sure, but how much would be good for all of this?

Can someone assist me in recommending me a good reliable PSU as well?

 

You would be better to go with a SSD, vs. using a platter drive for the storage. Not only will your system run cooler, but the SSD will start faster, and use less power, so you would not have to upgrade your Power supply.

The only other thing I would maybe suggest, is going with a NAS (Network Attached Storage), to keep those files like photos, movies, music on, vs. onboard the drive installed in the desktop unit.

 

SSD drives are expensive though, there is absolutely no way i would be able to 1 tb for $100.

I believe i can barely be able to get 120 gb for $100 or less.

 

SSD's do rock the speed, but yes, they are very expensive. Newegg has a regular SATA 1TB Seagate drive for $75 US. They may have other brands for less. Ebay is also a good place to check for drives.

Not seeing anything on its power consumption, but I think you will be fine with your existing power supply. Drives don't pull a lot of juice. Most commercial PC's are designed with this kind of upgrade in mind . . . lots of people add second hard drives and second optical drives to their desktops. I have an old HP I bought for my wife years ago and added second hard and optical drives, an add-in video capture card, and an add-in AGP video card . . . all on the original power supply. It did fine.

 

They are coming down in price, as the older platter drives are being phased out. Just like PATA was phased out pretty much in the past year, Sata platter drives will be around not much longer, within the next three years.

I remember when a 20mb used to cost over $200, I also remember the old Cake carrier platters that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now you cannot find one. Same goes for the costs of drives over the years. It now costs around a penny per mb for platter drives, because technology is changing, because of the mobile society.

Here within the next couple of months, I will be changing my son & mine platter drives in our Toshiba Satellite laptops to SSD's. We place pretty much everything in the cloud, so can get by with at least a 128gb, but probably go with a 240gb per machine, since they will be around the price of the 128gb drives by later this year.

You can if you wish, get the Seagate Barricuda for $75 from crucial. http://www.crucial.com/store/listmo...3072000~~2048000~~1536000~~1024000~/list.html

If technology did not move in the direction that it has, we would still see drives like this http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...argest-and-most-expensive-hard-drive-teardown Or we could have something like the IBM 305 RAMAC http://www.whatsthelatest.net/news/worlds-largest-hard-drive/ at 5mb