Where do I put this thing!?

[BradBo]

I finally bought a second 80 gig hd.

Can someone help me with installation.

I already have one 80 gig hd, one cd burner and one dvd player.

What is the best way to install the second hd.

Should I put the two cd units on one cable and the two hd's on one cable???

Thanks Brad

[b0r3d]

Putting both HDD's on one cable, and the roms on the other cable is a good idea.

Before you need to do anything, you need to set the jumpers on the back of the new hard drive to the slave setting. On the hard drive itself, it should have a little diagram telling you where to put the jumper to make it a slave.

On your IDE cable, there should be to places you can place a hard drive. The one at the very end is for a master drive, and the one in the middle, is for a slave drive.

Throw your new hard drive in the slave position, and turn your PC on. Enter bios and make sure that it has detected your new hard drive correctly, and reboot your computer. Windows should now see your new drive.

If you would like a more concise explanation, just let me know. I dont know how much you know about hardware, so its hard to tell the degree of detail to enter into, when describing how to do it

[Tinker]

To reinforce what b0r3d has given you here are some tutorials on the subject.

Seagte

Perfectdrivers

Hard drive upgrade

I would put one hard disk drive as master on IDE 0 and either the CD or the DVD as the slave one this same cable. Use your present HDD on this cable as it has your operating system on it (i.e. the C:\ drive). Now on the second cable I would put the second HDD as the master and the left over optical drive as the slave. My reason for this is that if you are going to copy files from HDD to HDD it is best to have them on different IDE channles IMHO....

After reading this information and you should still have questions please fell free to ask.

Good Luck and let us know how it turns out......

[BradBo]

Thanks you guys.

I'll get to work.

Brad

[R600]

I would have thought putting the CDRW as primary slave would be best for those who use a CDRW.

[MSNwar]

Like Tinker suggested. HD to HD on separate IDE channels when moving files from HD to HD as this streams the data without congestion on one cable. This configuration will also allow you to make one-to-one CD images because the CD Drives are on seperate cables, again without congestion. The idea is to create a bottleneck free system.

[ggtyh]

Tinker's idea is the beat on paper, IMHO, but might be difficult to implement in real life if your IDE cables are short (like mine).

[Aaron]

hmm. I think I might give this a try. But then, doesn't a CDRW perform best when its on Master?

[Tinker]

I always set the HDD as the master. How ever the visible results me be hard to see.

[R600]

hmm. I think I might give this a try. But then, doesn't a CDRW perform best when its on Master?

HD's are better on Master because you'll use it much more often.

CDRW's aren't in use all that much if you think about it. Also, I think it's unlikely that you'll be burning 650/700mb of data everytime you use the thing anyway so it's not going to hog your system all that much either.

I'm sure your CDRW has the SmartBurn technology in it - makes less of a worry.

[MSNwar]

Like this:

HD 0 Primary Master on IDE 0

CD-RW Secondary Master on IDE 0

HD 1 Primary Slave on IDE 1

CD-RW Secondary Slave on IDE 1

Cable 1:

Now you have the Boot Hard Drive ( HD 0 Primary Master) and the CD-RW (Secondary Master) on the same cable.

Cable 2:

Now you have HD 1 Primary Slave and the CD-RW Secondary Slave on the same cable.

So, when you transfer data from HD to HD the data is not transfered on the same cable. Also, when transfering data from CD to CD the data is not transfered on the same cable. This configuration is bottleneck free. Keep in mind the physical location of all devices when transfering data from one device to the other and the end result is a smooth data transfer. Also, elimnates the swap file thrashing while the Windows Operating System on the primary master Hard Drive is executing the commands.

All of my PCs at work and home supporting one floppy drive, two hard drives, and two CD drives are configured in this manner. This is pretty much an industry standard.

The second hard drive in most systems is used for an extra storage drive. In some cases it is used as a web server. Say you plan to store your files on the second hard drive and burn them to CD frequently. It makes logical sense to burn from a drive that does not contain the Operating System to a CD Drive on a seperate cable. You will achieve constant data throughput meaning fewer buffer underuns and fewer coasters. This will also be the solution to those who us Nero In-CD that have been experiencing problems with packet writing.

Edit. Some people refer to IDE Channels as 1 nd 2 vs 0 and 1. Yes, in large towers you will need one or two longer cables, 32 in works fine in most cases, excuse the pun.

Look ahead and you will see that if you replace the IDE boot drive (Primary Master) with a SCSI Hard Drive on a SCSI Bus that you have more ways to configure your drives.

[Porn Loader]

HD 0 Primary Master on IDE 0

CD-RW Secondary Master on IDE 0

HD 1 Primary Slave on IDE 1

CD-RW Secondary Slave on IDE 1

alright i may be mistaken on this but .....

arent you killing your hdd performance by putting it on the same ide as a cd drive? aka you are trying to grab info from your 2nd master(cd drive), and drop it on your pri master(hdd). arent you limited to whatever your cd drive can handle data transfer wise? so if my cd rom is a ata33/pio2 mode/whatever, but my hdd is ata 100... im transferring data at the limiting factor speed?

[MSNwar]

PornLoader, nah not really. I was waiting for that to come up. That would apply to older hard dries like 5400 rpm, ata 33 (even 66), Non-ATAPI CD drives, but todays newer 7200 rpm drives on a FSB 100 or 133 running ATAPI CD drives won't make a big difference anymore. But you are right about it if all the hardware met those exact specifications.