Misconfigured Hard Drive

[bschmitt13]

My wife's computer has always seemed slow, but it works. While she was out, I decided to take a look at the BIOS settings and it seems her hard drive is configured as a slave, with no master configured. Before I pull the box out, does anyone know if this could be a potential issue with performance?

 

[Hawkeye22]

The bios doesn't designate drives as master/slave, only SATA/IDE ports enabled/disabled. The master/slave listing is dependent on which sata port the drive is plugged into on the motherboard.

If this is a sata drive, then no need to worry as sata doesn't use master/slave, but will sometimes list it that way for legacy purposes.

If it's an IDE drive, master/slave is configured via jumpers on the hard drive. If there are no other IDE drives in the system then it should be configured as master or some drives have a setting for "single", though I haven't seen many drives with a "single" setting these days.

 

[bschmitt13]

Thanks. It's IDE. I guess I'll have to pull it out and change the jumpers.

This came up because I was thinking of adding an extra 500GB SATA drive I have from another project with an IDE/SATA converter on it and wanted to see what was in there now. The current drive is very small (27GB) anyway, so ultimately I plan to clone it and then put it on a shelf