Before physically installing your hard drive or CD-ROM, it is easier to configure them outside of the case. Configuring them involves changing jumpers, and doing this within the confines of the case can be quite difficult sometimes.
How to configure these drives depends on how many drives you intend to install and of what type.
Your motherboard has two built-in IDE channels, each supporting two devices. If two devices are on one channel, one must be the “master” and the other the “slave”. Usually, your primary hard drive (the one which contains the operating system) is the master and the other drive is the slave. If you only intend to install one hard drive and having nothing else on that IDE channel, then you can select the “cable select” setting for the drive, which tells the drive it is alone on the channel.
You can attach any IDE device onto your IDE channels in any order. But, it is recommend you use IDE1 for your hard drives and IDE2 for your CD drives. It is always best to keep the CD drives on a separate channel from the hard drives.
Configuring these drives is very easy. Often the jumper settings are printed on the top of the drive itself. On CD drives, the settings are described right above the jumper pins. On hard drives, the information is printed on the top of the hard drive, if it is printed at all. If not, then consult the manual for it or go online to try finding the specs. The manuals will also outline any special jumper settings such as use of the limiter jumper on Maxtor hard drives.
If a particular drive does not need to be jumpered at all, it is best to hang the jumper over one pin. This is the same as being unjumpered, but makes sure the jumper is there for future use if needed.
If you are using SATA Hard drives, you are in luck. Because each SATA drive uses its own channel, there is no need for jumpers or worrying about master/slave relationships.
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If you want your PC to be fast, besides getting a motherboard with a faster FSB (front side bus) or installing multi-cpu’s, consider configuring it with multiple physical hard drives (like 3 or more). Get a RAID controller board that will allow you to configure your hard drives at DOS level (that is, before Windows boots up) so that the system see’s all your hard drives as if they all are only 1 physical drive. More drives = faster DATA throughput; faster data throughput = faster read/write operations. Duh?! Since all drives are reading/writing at the same time, it increases the amount of data that is read/written which in turn gives you faster data access. Needless to say, this can pretty much eliminate the bottleneck at the data read/write stage. Also a plus, when Windows reads/writes to its virtual memory file, it is much faster too!
You’ll notice that your system doesn’t seem like it’s grinding at your hard drive endlessly. Trust me, you’ll notice a difference (and your boot up stage will literally take only a few seconds). Enjoy!
That will only affect read/write speed of your HDD, not actual speed of operations.
But it can read multiple drives simultaneously, so operations that are waiting for data do not have to wait as long, so that makes them faster!
So, I am building my first PC and I was very excited through the whole process, however, after I connected all the cables went to turn the PC on, I got almost nothing. The system did not boot, there is a slight click coming from the power supply and the fans try to work, but never really get moving.
I have checked all the connections and everything seems right, but as I said this is my first build. Any thoughts on what could be making the computer not turn over, for lack of a better term.
Ian,
I would check that your 12V and 5V leads are not hooked up backwards. usually 12V is yellow and the 5V is red. I say that you might have these backwards due to you saying the fans try to work but never really get moving, this is what happens when you hook the 5V where the 12V needs to be.
HI Rob,
I have the same problem, the only differenceisthe fan wire has a leadwhich direct you to the right dircton of connection, but still the same problem, cooling fan is trying to work, but stop..I did check the power switch, and it seemsto beok too
Thanks
I also built a computer. I placed two hard drives each having 40GB. I set BIOS to auto detect and it is detecting both hard drives. However when I open “My Computer”, it only shows one drive, Drive C:\ that is. I cannot see nor can I use the other drive as it is not being shown. When u install two drives there is supposed to be another local disk ryt?? Can anyone help me on this one. Thanks.
Is there a Drive D:\?
Usually that is the secondary/backup drive. Sometimes it’s F:\ too.
Howard, as it says above, “If two devices are on one channel, one must be the “master” and the other the “slave”.” You need to set the jumpers on the drives.