installing second hard drive

[alt123]

i plan on installing a second hard drive for storage, is it best to make the drive a slave to the IDE 1 Hard drive or make it master on the second IDE connector

[bailey]

well for my personal opinion, I would set it as master on the second port because you will have a faster transfer rate from one drive to the other drive.
the ide cable can only read or write at any one time, and if on separate ports they will be able to do both at the same time.
one reading and the other writing.

[jackwelsh]

Hi,

Making the drive as master would help you in case you do not have any other drive.. eg. CDROM, DVDROM etc. If you have any other drive keep your second Harddrive on Primary IDE channel as slave. Read and write would not make much of a difference, it all depends upon how fast is your Harddrive. If your HDD is of higher Rpm, access would be faster.

Do check for compatibility of two drives as well.
Jack

[rjfvillarosa]

Can you give us some information about the machine you want to install the slave drive into?
Number of existing harddrives?
Number of optical drives and type?
The ribbon cable that connects the harddrive to the motherboard, is it 40 wire or 80 wire? if it is 40 wire the plugs will be all the same colour, if it is 80 wire the plug on the motherboard end of the cable is usually blue, on the opposite end it should be black and there will be a grey plug in the middle.
Is this a custom built machine or a branded model?
Have you made any hardware changes to this machine before? and most importantly what is the make and model of the power supply?

[DoomLord]

Do you do a lot of stuff with your CD or DVD burners? If all you are using the second drive for is storage,and you use your CD/DVD drives a lot,then I would recommend that you set your second hard drive as a slave on IDE 0 (primary IDE channel) and attach it to the GREY connector on the ribbon cable. Attach the optical drive that you burn with to the BLACK connector on #2 ribbon cable, then plug it in to IDE 1 (secondary IDE channel). Next time you
reboot,check to see if the drive order is correct in the bios,and then in Windows. If it is,go
into Adminisrative tools,computer management,then Drive management,select the new drive,
then format it (NTFS preferred),unless your main drive uses FAT32. After that,you're ready to
go.

DoomLord

[TwoRails]

Just for clarification: it does Not matter if you run an optical drive "behind" a hard drive. I've run them that way for years as it's an "old" performance trick. Both my burners are slaved to the HD masters. Yes, you get a little speed boost if you run the second HD on the second IDE channel as bailey mentions in more detail.