[n00biSniper]

hi. i have a shuttle computer barebones and the motherboard says
"IDE: 2x ATA100, 2x SATA" for the drives it can support.

on a newly bought harddrive i have the specs are:
Hard Drive Detailed Specifications:

Description: Barracuda 7200.8 ST3320620A 320GB Hard Drive (Ultra ATA-100, 7200 RPM, 16MB)
Manufacturer: Seagate
Model a
Capacity: 320 GB
Interface: IDE (Ultra ATA/100)
Interface Type: IDE - ATA/EIDE/ATAPI 40 pin Header
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Cache Size: 16 MB
Maximum Transfer Rate: 100 MBytes/sec
Access Time: 8 ms
Internal/External: Internal
Form Factor Width: 3.5 in
Included Components: Cabling (Interface)
Dimensions
Height: 1.03 in
Width: 4 in
Depth: 5.79 in
Weight: 1.39 lbs

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if i added this to my motherboard, would they be compatable? and work properly?

[Nitestick]

yes presuming you configure the jumper settings (master/slave/cable select) correctly and install it physically correctly (cable correct way around etc) AND you have windows XP SP1 or SP2 rather than the original XP. do you plan on using this as your boot drive or just as another storage drive?

finally how many hdds and dvd/cd drives do you have?

[n00biSniper]

the drive would become another storage drive and i would have 2 Hdds, and 1 optical drive

[turtile]

Just plug it in and format. If you have Sata 3Gb/s, remove the jumper to enable it.

[Nitestick]

Interface: IDE (Ultra ATA/100)

it's not a SATA drive well in my opinion you should make it a "Master" drive by following the diagrams that should be printed on the hdd. one will depict where the position of the "jumper" should be to make this setting (may refer to master as MA instead). just pull the little jumper thing off the pins and position it where it is in the diagram, you may need needle nose pliers or tweezers to get it out but probably not. then make your cd drive a slave in the same way, the settings for the cd drive are probably shown by markings directly above the pins the jumper sits on that say MA, CS, SL (Master, Cable Select, Slave). put the jumper below the one that says SL or Slave and you're pretty much done in configuring the drives. just plug them in to the power (while the pc is off of course ) and plug the new HDD and CD-ROM into the same data cable.

i hope you know how to format?

[jolancer]

just a note:

havning the HDD as a Secondary Master, as 'nitestick' mentioned, is Ideal..

..but sometimes the placement of the CD/Optical drive makes it sort impractical if you dont have another bay to put it in. (cause if the Optical drive is Slave, you may need to move it bellow the HDD to get the EIDE cable to fit).

note though: Master or Slave possition for the secondary HDD is fine, you wont notice any perfromance difference between either. so dont stress it.

..incase you dont aready know, once you have it in the comp, you can just go to ->/start/run, type (diskmgmt.msc) hit enter.... then right click on the drive and format it with Default NTFS settings.

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EDIT:

i just noticed on your First post you said you using it on a Barebone setup... witch means that may be the only HDD you have for it right now.... witch means.. if your using that HDD for your Operating system, Yes definalty install it in the Primiary MASTER position.

A little more info:
if you ever add another EIDE HDD to the system.. you wont notice much of a performance diff between Secondary SLAVE/Master, however, you will notice a performance difference between copy operations from 1 HDD to the other, *IF the secondary HDD is on the Primary Slave slot(Same EIDE cable as the First HDD)..

..as long as its ona differetn EIDE cable, it'l be good.