Help, Dual Hard Drives ?

Hello I have an extra hard drive and was wondering if I would make one master and the other slave on the same connection cable or should I connect them both as master on different cables that cannect to the mother board. And what are the benefits of having dual hard drives ?

thank you for helping
Rolo

Well, what other drives do you have? If you have room on your secondary IDE cable I would suggest putting the second hard drive there because if you are writing lots of information to both hard drives it doesnt have to squish it all down into one IDE cable.

what are the benefits of having two hard drives?

First and most obvious: More room.

Second: You can put your operating system and program files on one and all your other junk on the other. If you are running windows it helps performance wise to keep a lot of space free on your OS hard drive. I heard something that if your OS hard drive is over 50% full it starts slowing down. Anyone else hear that?

Hope that helped rolo. :)

I was thinking about placing one drive and my dvd=rw and on the other ide the second drive and my cdrw. I read that that should speed up my system

Sounds good to me.

*Moved from AntiOnline: How do I?*

get a cable with 3 *connection*...sorry bout the names lol", connect one end to the motherboard, connect the slave HD in the middle and the Master on the other end of the cable. It can also work if you connect the slave HD as a slave of your CD-ROM drive and keep the master HD by itself.

u couldalso use the 2 harddrives fora Raid0 config

ok what is a Raid0 config ?

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I was thinking about placing one drive and my dvd=rw and on the other ide the second drive and my cdrw. I read that that should speed up my system

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There have been cases in the past where people discover a degradation in performance when connecting drives in this way. Most sources suggest connecting the IDE hard drives to one cable and the CD-R/W and DVD-R/W. The degradation typically occurs when accessing both a CD-ROM and a hard drive on the same cable (supposedly, the hard drive slows to a crawl). I haven't experienced this myself, but I have heard about it and read about it often.

AJ

OKAY.....................the classic configuration is both hard-drives on one cable using a master slave/or "cable connect" configuration........with "cable connect" the drive on the end connector is identified as the master, and the second one as slave............this is a typical EIDE setup.

On your second EIDE string you put your DVD and CD RWRW drives, usually with the DVD as master. Older systems may have a ZIP drive or tape streamer on this line.

Remember that EIDE only supports 4 addresses, 2 per cable; unlike SCUSI, which supports around 7- 9 in a "daisy chain" configuration..........please forgive me for any inexactitude there...never been able to afford it :(

I would stick with this, and NOT mix hard drives on the two strings.

If your MoBo will support it and you have the relevant software you can run a "RAID" this is a "Redundant Array of Independent Disks"

Raid 0 is also called "striping". Here your box uses both drives at the same time, virtually doubling the I/O transfer rate. If one of your drives crashes...you are history!!!!!.......if you go there...go RAID5...and go SCUSI.........hey you should be able to afford independent personal consultants as well :D

I have built a pair of boxes with RAID1, which is also called "mirroring"...to do this properly you need an identical pair of drives, and your EIDE MoBo will have two single master connectors for them. Whatever happens on one drive is duplicated or "mirrored" on the other...so if you lose one drive, you continue business as usual without data loss. When you replace the dead drive it copies across and restores your mirror protection.

This is the configuration that I recommend for home office, small business and critical educational use. It allows you to keep running until you have time to get a new drive, and you don't have all the hassle of restoring from backups....................we all back up our work every session of course :rolleyes:

Hope this helps