Dell Mini Tower System manual Connecting Drives, Installing a Drive in a 5.25-Inch Drive Bay

Connecting Drives

When installing a drive, you connect two cables— a direct current (DC) power cable and an interface cable—to the back of the drive. Your drive’s power input connector (to which you connect the DC power cable) resembles the connector shown in Figure 7-4.

power input connector

DC power cable

Figure 7-4. DC Power Cable Connector

The drive’s interface connector is a card-edge connector or a header connector, as shown in Figure 7-5.

card-edge notch connector

on drive

colored strip

header connector

on drive

interface cables

colored strip

Figure 7-5. Drive Interface Connectors

When attaching the interface cable to a drive, be sure to match the colored strip on the cable to pin 1 of the drive’s

interface connector. For the location of pin 1 on the drive’s interface connector, see the documentation that came with the drive.

When disconnecting an interface cable from the system board, be sure to press in on the locking tabs on the cable connector before disconnecting the cable. When attach- ing an interface cable to the system board, be sure that the locking tabs snap into place, ensuring that the cable is firmly attached to the connector on the system board.

Most interface connectors are keyed for correct insertion; that is, a notch or a missing pin on one connector matches

atab or a filled-in hole on the other connector (see Fig- ure 7-5). Keying ensures that the pin-1 wire in the cable (indicated by the colored strip along one edge of the cable) goes to the pin-1 end of the connector.

The pin-1 end of a connector on a board or a card is usu- ally indicated by a silk-screened “1” printed directly on the board or card.

CAUTION: When connecting an interface cable, do not reverse the interface cable (do not place the colored strip away from pin 1 of the connector). Reversing the cable prevents the drive from operating and could damage the controller, the drive, or both.

Installing a Drive in a 5.25-Inch Drive Bay

The 5.25-inch drive bays can accommodate any of the following types of half-height drives:

•A diskette drive or tape drive that uses the diskette/ tape drive interface on the system board

•A CD-ROM or tape drive that uses the secondary EIDE interface on the system board

•A CD-ROM or tape drive that uses its own controller card

NOTE: For information on configuring, connecting, and installing SCSI drives, see “Installing SCSI Devices” found later in this chapter.

Installing Drives 7-3