adding another hard drive

[jdbic]

I have a 100gig hd. I was thinking of adding a 120gig with the 8mb buffer. ($80. after rebate at best buy). I don't think the 100 has the 8mb buffer. Would it matter if the 120 was the slave?

Nope .. one drive will be slightly faster than the other, nothing to worry about.

[soulja]

do you even know if ur pc can handle both ??

[John Prophet]

It wouldnt hurt anything, but it would be better probably to copy the 100g over to the 120g so that the operating system is running off of the quicker drive.

The 120g probably comes with some sort of disk copying software.

You would copy the 100g to the 120g and then keep the 100g unplugged at first...then after making sure the 120g had copied over correctly etc and was working good...you would THEN just format the 100g and you are ready to go.

Of course, with that much space you may want to think about different partitioning schemes rather than just having a huge c: and a huge D: drive.

I dont know that much about fancy partition setups but I am sure some people here do. But you could perhaps at least have the second drive partitioned to where it had a certain amount used for backup. Like a 30-50g partition (or whatever size) set aside for backups.

There are fancier ways of doing things such as making the C: partition fairly small and putting JUST the operating system on it and then putting all the programs etc on the D: partition so that if the operating system gets messed up you can more easily just reinstall it without necessarily reinstalling all of the programs.

JP

[soulja]

i like to have mines as whole cause when i partion its more of a pain deleting the other partions when formating

[Gait_Keeper]

Originally posted by KenKun
Nope .. one drive will be slightly faster than the other, nothing to worry about.

I have a similar set up

40gig WD 7200rpm 2mb cache ata100
80gig maxtor 7200rpm 8mb cache ata 133

my chip set is ata 100 so both run at 100, but the cache difference will make the 8Mb cached drive faster

[John Prophet]

I have a cool "quick format" cd. I made it with ghost. Basically you take a blank hard drive and you format it with Fat32. Then you make an image of just that.

Then I have a batch file on a boot floppy that automatically kicks off ghost. So I make the ghost bootable cd and it asks do I want to put a bootable floppy on it...so I put the bootable auto run batch floppy on it.

You put the cd in, boot it, and you have to type in "y" and "agree" to kick it off, but then it takes less than 1 second to have a fully formatted fat32 partition. Beats sitting there twenty minutes with the format c: command.

I suppose one could do the same with NTFS.

Or also you could do stuff like have a blank fat32 format with just W98 cab files.

So you'd boot off of it, quick format and then youd have the cab files on the drive ready to run install.

JP

[jdbic]

Ok, thanks.
I use winxppro ,mobo a7v333. It should handle the extra drive.
And I will partition, and try the transfer from the 100 to the 120.

[jdbic]

Ok,
It's been a while, but I finally got the drive. The 100 gig has three partitions on it. After I copy the 100 to the 120, where would the extra 20 end up?
Also as I read the installation guide, it mentions cable select. If I didn't use cable select when I put in the original, can I change it to cable select?

[Gait_Keeper]

cable select will let your machine decide master or slave,

I think it's better to set master and slave your self, I have no facts to back that up, it just feels right to me

the extra 20gigs?? that depends on how you partition up the drive

i.e. 60+60=120
30+30+30+30=120
40+40+40=120
15+15+15+15+15+15+15+15=120

see what I mean??