adding extra drives to a system

[Airmack]

I have a pc with a 80gig maxtor drive and I have some older 2-4 gig WD drives that I want to use for backup.

Is it as easy as just putting the WD drive as slave, plug it into the ide cable and boot windows xp and the drive will show up. Right click on it in my computer and click format or is there more to it?

[ConLog]

That is basically all there is to it.:)

[Airmack]

and people said xp sucked.

[TheJackal]

You might want to put your 2-4gig drives on a seperate channel from the 80gig drive as the smaller ones would be considerably slower and you may notice a decrease in system performance.

[glc]

If the drives don't show up in My Computer, open Disk Management and they should be in there - repartition and reformat them in there.

Win2K works the exact same way, this is not an XP exclusive.

If you use an 80 wire cable and Cable Select jumpering, they will not slow the system down if connected to the same channel as your main drive.

[Airmack]

Originally posted by glc
If the drives don't show up in My Computer, open Disk Management and they should be in there - repartition and reformat them in there.

Win2K works the exact same way, this is not an XP exclusive.

If you use an 80 wire cable and Cable Select jumpering, they will not slow the system down if connected to the same channel as your main drive.

so put the smaller drive on CS but dont the cable need to have a special thing for CS

cs being cable select

[glc]

If it's a modern 80 wire Ultra ATA cable, it's a cable select cable. Blue connector to mobo, black to master, gray in the middle to slave. Both drives should be jumpered to CS.

[Airmack]

what is i put it in a mobile rack. Can I put it as slave, plug it in when i need to back up and take it out as needed?

[TheJackal]

yes you can.

[glc]

Yes, and if you use a mobile rack, you should definitely use an 80 wire cable and CS jumpering on all drives.

[Airmack]

snaps.

[theENiGMA]

Who says XP sucks? XP is great, especially compared to its unstable as a donkey with one leg predecessors.
-KEiTH

[glc]

Have you ever used Win2000, enigma?

[Airmack]

2k pro unstable????

the only windows 2000 system I seen that was unstable was one running Avid.

www.avid.com

[Vertech]

i think WinXp is the best I've seen so far. I rarely have any crash or lock ups

[glc]

XP is just 2K with extra fluff, I see no difference in stability.