Up and Running

 

As you can see by the object plugged into the upper right bay of my computer, I received my HHD drive with spinning disks inside but that is my second one.

The first one arrived and after figuring out that hard drives now are mounted with "sleds" (that lighter blue colored object) and not using physical screws like in the old days. It is actually kind of ingenious as I have fussed with small screws that got dropped during installation and were nearly impossible to find. The sleds require only fingers and slide in, out and snap into place. I turned on the computer and saw nothing that said I had installed a hard drive.

A day later, maybe three hours of troubleshooting and another hour on the phone, I finally figured out that my computer actually limits the size of a hard drive to 2TB (terabytes). All my data is just shy of 1/2 TB so really, having that limitation is not a hard ship. But while shopping for the hard drive online, many drives start at 2 TB in size these days and I fell into the classic shopping ploy of telling myself, "for only another $40, I can triple the amount of storage capacity on my computer." You can buy 20 TB drives all day long over the internet but Dell must have their reasons.

So I had to return the drive which cost me about $7 to ship back but they did give me a full refund which I thought was iffy considering the sensitive nature of spinning platter hard drives. I ordered the basic 2 TB drive and a few days later popped it in above and took the picture. I booted up my computer and five minutes later, was back in business with and security camera doing their thing. If I ever have to do this again, I'll just start off by calling my daughter and hope she has an idea on how to proceed.