questions about setting up a second drive

[crud_tud]

i recently assembled a pretty high end rig that i'm very happy with, but in hindsight would have done a couple things differently. my biggest mistake was getting a single 74gb raptor as my sole hard drive. it just isn't enough space. i thought about getting a second one, and more recently have read rave reviews for the new 150gb versison. but even 150gb could be insufficient for my needs. so i'm thinking about buying a 250gb (or larger) drive to supplement, and eventually replace my current raptor. couple questions i have:

1) how easy would it be to set up a second drive to use essentially for data, while still keeping all my system and program files on the raptor?

2) would it be problematic to eventually install some programs on the second drive as well? when you install a program, like a big game. do all the files go in the same exact folder? or do some end up in system folders? am i going to end up in a situation where the files for a given program are spread across two different hard drives, and if so, is that a problem?

3) let's say i decide to simply sell my 2 month old raptor now and buy a big (250gb to 400gb) but slower 7,200rpm drive with a 16mb cache. any recommendations? thanks.

[ktkendall]

If it's sata drive just put it on the other sata channel, if it's IDE and your going to share it on the same ide channel as the main harddrive just jumper both to CS and put it on the middle connector of the same ribbon cable as the 75G drive. It's easy and since you built your own PC you will have no problem. You could use the drive cloning program that came with either drive also to clone to the new drive so you could use the bigger one as primary boot drive then reformat and use the 75G as a backup or storage drive..

[crud_tud]

Thanks for the reply. My raptor is a SATA drive, and I've got 4 channels if I remember right, so adding another one should be pretty easy. But as to your suggestion to use the bigger drive as a boot drive, wouldn't it make more sense to use the raptor as my boot drive and to load all my programs because it's faster than a 7,200rpm one?

[ktkendall]

Yes I agree, really what I was thinking if if your going to sell that 75G drive and just kep one bigger drive, you can just use a harddrive cloning program and won't have to reinstall everything to the new drive..

[crud_tud]

Yes that does make much more sense. Thank you. I never thought of cloning (and frankly don't know anything about it), but I can already see how it'd be a quicker process than reinstalling windows, reinstalling all my programs onto the new drive, then copying all the data as well.

[gary_hendricks]

Here are my answers. Hope they help you out. :)

1) how easy would it be to set up a second drive to use essentially for data, while still keeping all my system and program files on the raptor?

This is no issue at all. Simply install your second drive as a slave on the primary IDE channel on the motherboard. Or you can install it on the secondary IDE channel (in which case you should make it a slave if you have a CD-ROM as master there).


2) would it be problematic to eventually install some programs on the second drive as well? when you install a program, like a big game. do all the files go in the same exact folder? or do some end up in system folders? am i going to end up in a situation where the files for a given program are spread across two different hard drives, and if so, is that a problem?

Yes, if you want to install big apps or games on the second drive, it is ok. However, I tend to install my most commonly used apps on the C:\ drive, that is, my original drive. It makes for slightly better performance because you need not force Windows to access another hard drive. This is assuming Windows is on your C:\ drive, of course.

3) let's say i decide to simply sell my 2 month old raptor now and buy a big (250gb to 400gb) but slower 7,200rpm drive with a 16mb cache. any recommendations? thanks.

Why yes. I always think Western Digital (http://store.westerndigital.com/product.asp?sku=2643746) is good.

[glc]

Gary, a Raptor is a SATA drive.

[gary_hendricks]

Hi glc

I stand corrected. :o

Since the Raptor is a SATA drive, you need to check the motherboard. On the motherboard there should be a port SATA1 for the primary drive, SATA2 for the secondary drive.

Ignore what I said about master and slave on the primary and secondary IDE channels, since SATA drives don't have jumpers.