Question on HDD

[trencin]

i currently have a 40 GB (ATA 100) hard drive, and i am wondering can i buy anotherr hard drive to add some more storage room with higher cpacity than 40 GB in slave drive I think ? I am new at this so please help me. Thanks!

 

[Zenthar]

Unless you have a BIOS/Motherboard/OS issue, there should be nothing preventing you from adding a 2nd bigger HD as slave.

The master/slave relationship is, from what I know, only for communication puposes with the IDE controller and should not tamper with any other aspect. But you should know that if you add a drive on the same bus which has a faster interface that ATA-100 (ex: ATA-133), the faster drive will "downgrade" to ATA-100 (the slowest of the 2) no matter which one is master or slave.

 

[trencin]

ok thanks for the help. I dont need to install windows on the slave drive do I ?

 

[kitchenshark]

Simple answer:

Do NOT install windows to your slave drive

 

[paybax]

Hey Tren,
NO do not install your O/S on the slave. If you do, the 2 drives will fight between each other and cause you major grief and unrest. All you have to do is make sure your ata drive is set to "slave" (most hdd's come with a diagram of sorts to indicate how to set the jumpers), once that is done, plug in the drive, go into the bios to make sure your mobo "SEE'S " this new drive.
Depending on what type of drive it is, you should go to the website of the drive (Maxtor, WD, SEagate, etc) and download the install and utility drivers for it.
YOu will then have to "initialize" it and format it before you can start to use it. Once the utility has completed it's formatting, you can now use it to move files and whatever to your new drive.
Hope this helps and if you have any trouble, send another post and I can help you further. I will whatch out for the post this evening ok?

 

[smitbret]

ATA 133/ATA 100 makes no difference in reality, though. No hard drive is going to reach the data transfer speed that either ATA 100 or 133 allow for. So in reality it doesn't matter if you combine two hard drives with these different bandwidth ratings.
-Brett

 

[trencin]

hey thanks a lot guys everything wokred ok. Appreciate the help. I installed another 80 GB HDD (ATA 100)

 

[lolitha]

Adding two HDD drives in a same cable doesn't it slows down the computer .I think it is, If u can install it on Secondary Master It's better

 

[maury73]

This is not exact. Interface speed is related to DMA transfers only, each drive can has its own speed, not matter if it is slave of master.
Only the commands goes to both drives, but DMA transfers are ignored by the device not affected by the that particular data transfer.
It only slows down if you do transfers at the same time: in this case yes, the bandwidth is limited by the slowest drive, but if you do the transfers one at a time there's no issue.

 

[trencin]

In what senario would i need to do 2 transfers at the same time ? Just curious

 

[Zenthar]

Downloading a file to a drive while installing a software on another, copying a file from one drive to another, things like that. But as some people pointed-out, most HD are unable to reach the bus maximum transfer rate anyway, so the impact is minimal.

 

[Hawkeye22]

But you should know that if you add a drive on the same bus which has a faster interface that ATA-100 (ex: ATA-133), the faster drive will "downgrade" to ATA-100 (the slowest of the 2) no matter which one is master or slave.

I didn't think this was true any more and that newer mobo's can handle the different speeds on the same E/IDE controller correctly. However, it's still a good idea to put HD's on the primary controller and optical drives on the secondary controller.

 

[hybrid09]

Don't install an OS on the slave. Basically when you don't Windows will detect it as a drive, and then you can save/copy stuff onto it from the 40GB or continue using 40GB as a main Windows drive, and the new drive as file storage, etc.

 

[lolitha]

When v buy a MB what pata cables do they give us 40 conductor or 80 conductor or both ??

 

[lolitha]

can this "cross-talk" cause detection problems ??