New hard drive for older computer...

[cigarman]

The computer is a Pentium II at about 300 or 350 mhz I believe. I was asked by the owner if replacing the current 4.5 gig hard drive with a new 120 gig unit would be ok. He's interested in either a 40 gig, an 80 gig or the 120, but he's leaning towards the 120. Would a 40 gig drive be easier for that machine to handle than a 120 gig drive, or wouldn't it really matter? And what about memory? Currently the unit has about 256 meg I believe--running win98. Would going to a larger capacity drive require more memory to run efficiently?

 

[Nodsu]

The maximum hard drive supported depends on the motherboard and the BIOS revision. Find out what motherboard it is, go to the manufacturer's website and download the latest BIOS. See the release notes/revision information for any hints about hard drive sizes.

137GB is a definite limit to your hard drive size. 32GB and 64GB are two other limits you may have. I would think anything below 32GB will work.

Some hard drives have a special jumper that restricts the drive size to 32GB. Make sure you get one of those.

 

[Samstoned]

yes I think your limit would be 40 gb
possible stretch to 80 with adapter card(no boot)
on system like that I would suggest 15 to 20 as boot drive with win98 on first 10gb's of drive
use rest as storage
at this point drive worth almost as much as the rest of machine