HD Installation Advice

[Livingston Dell]

Hello,

I plan to buy a second hard drive - 120GB Western Digital HD with 8MB cache - but i'm not entirely sure on installing it. I've been told two conflicting pieces of information

"Installing two HDs on the same IDE line will not affect performance in anyway"
&
"I should keep the two HDs on seperate IDE lines as they are the most resource heavy"

From my limited hardward knowledge, i believe the latter to be true but i could well be wrong. Currently my CD-RW and my DVD-Drive are plugged into one IDE socket and my current HD is in the other IDE socket.

My question is... How should i connected up the new HD?

- Main HD + DVD-Drive
- Second HD + CD-RW

or

- Main HD + Second HD
- DVD-Drive + CD-RW

Thanks for your help :)

[glc]

You can run the 2 hard drives master/slave on the same cable without impacting each other if you use an 80 wire IDE cable and jumper both drives to CS (Cable Select).

Blue to controller
Black on the other end to master
Gray in the middle to slave

[Livingston Dell]

That's great, thank you! :)

[Kov-Ice]

I've had problems with trying to run an optic drive on the same IDE as the HDD. I think I've seen others recommend that optic drives and HDDs be kept on separate channels.

[glc]

That problem has gone away with 80 wire cable select too.

[KHT]

Originally posted by glc
That problem has gone away with 80 wire cable select too.

I didn`t realize that. Could you possibly direct me to a resource?

Thanks.

[Livingston Dell]

I finally have my new HD installed after many delays this week and just have one other question ;)

Details on the drive i bought:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=27

When i checked the device manager, the current trasfer mode of the first device in the primary IDE channel is Ultra DMA mode 5, whereas the second device (the new HD) has been set to PIO mode.

Is this a general bug with XP (as i've had this on the secondary IDE channel with two CD drives) that the transfer mode of the second device on an IDE channel is often set to PIO, or is this what it should be getting detected as?

Should i just uninstall the Primary IDE channel from the device manager and get XP to correct it on next boot up?

** Edit **
Sorted it now with some BIOS setting trickery. Thanks :)