Buying a Hard Drive on s

Hello fellow okay Junkies!Well if you review my purchases on okay you will see that very many of them are hard drives and on a couple I made simple mistakes that should have been avoided by me. First off, READ the decriptions. Just because its a good price doesnt mean it's junk. It could be someone that just upgraded to the latest and greatest technology and just wanted rid of their outdated hardware, but just in case, READ it. Make sure the seller GUARANTEES that it will not be DOA (Dead On Arrival) Or else you will get a hard drive that a true geek with an extra HD chassis could put back together, but for most users it would be a big ugly paperweight that makes a lot of clicking sounds when you put power to it. Secondly, make sure the hard drive it a type you can use. There are a few different hookups on a motherboard. SATA, SATA II, IDE, SCSI, SCSI II, just to name the main ones. For most geputers from 1995-2003 you will mostly use IDE connections. This is a wide gray cable with 40 pins. Newer systems (2003-present) have IDE ports and SATA ports (SATA and SATA II connectors are little black rectangles less than an inch wide and about 1/8 of an inch tall) If you are like me and have a latest Generation DELL, then you only have ONE IDE port on the motherboard which is used for both of your CD/DVD-ROM drives, so buying another IDE drive means you have to disconnect one of these drives, so buying a SATA or SATA II would be your best bet. You can buy a SATA or SATA II without fear of which type of SATA port you have because the new standard will work with the old SATA's.(Left = IDE Cable