Adding HD: master or slave? installation?

[aqualectrix]

I am adding a second hard drive to my computer. The old one is a Seagate Barracuda, 80GB, 2MB cache, and the new one is a Seagate 120GB, 8MB cache. Both are IDE; my OS is XP Pro, if that matters.

I *think* I would like to use the new drive as the master, since it has the better cache. Am I right? The procedures for just adding it as a slave seem very simple, and if it doesn't matter I suppose I'll go that way.

Also, I'm rather new at fiddling around with hardware and would appreciate some instructions for the installation process. I think I've got the physical part down -- both drives set to cable select, with the black plug in the master and the grey in the slave.

However:
-- How do I get the computer to recognize the new drive?
-- I have to format and partition the new drive. How? Do you recommend more than one partition?
-- Instructions for using the new drive as the master seem to be much more complicated, and are really why I'm here. I assume I would set it up as the slave, partition, etc., copy everything over (including the OS, if I can), and then switch it to being master and reformat the old 80GB so it's clean? But how?

Let me be more clear on my goals. Assuming I use the 120GB as the new master, how should I partition it -- I've read here about a separate partition for the swap space, and even for My Documents? And then how should I transfer everything over from the 80GB, including the OS if possible? And then how do I reformat the 80GB? Of course, this is all irrelevant if you tell me to just use the 120GB as a slave.

I'm woefully ignorant, I'm afraid, and haven't been able to find any good step-by-step tutorials which address my questions. Any and all help is appreciated.

--aqualectrix

[glc]

The easiest way is just use the new drive as a slave. If you are satisfied with the speed of your computer, it's not worth the extra steps to clone the old drive to the new and fiddling with partitions. The speed difference between the 2 drives is minor as long as they are both 7200 rpm.

If you simply do that, all you have to do is boot it up into Windows, right click on My Computer, select Manage, go into Disk Management, find the new drive, right click on it, partition and format it as desired.

[aqualectrix]

Excellent. Thank you very much.