Adding a second Hard Drive

[BluesMan1]

I would like to add a second HD to my system.

I have a Maxtor 120 Gig alone on his IDE cable and a CD-ROM and a burner on a second IDE cable, the burner is set as Master and the CD as slave.

There's two solutions to add a second HD and i would like to know what you think would be the best.

1- Add the second HD as slave to the first one keeping the same IDE cable for both HD

Or

2- Change the burner and add it as Slave to the first HD and add the second HD as Master on the second IDE cable with the CD as slave.

Which one will work best or is there anything better than this 2 solutions.

thanks again for your time

[BluesMan1]

Maybe i should mention that i'm using Asus A7N8X Deluxe board....

[muno]

Maybe you should click 'edit' instead of replying to your own post.

The choice 1) is the only reasonable solution.
Setting hd's and cd's on different ide in the stone era might've been wise, but it isn't so anymore.

They will NOT perform faster that way. So, just set the new drive as pri slave.

[stroyal]

The best solution is adding a PCI/IDE controler for a third and fourth IDE channel. You can then Rip, Burn from HDs, and copy from CD-ROM to the HDs at max speed.
With # 1 you might not be able to Rip ( copy CD to CD).

If you can rip now, go with #1.

[JohnE.]

"Asus A7N8X Deluxe board...." - already has a built-in SATA controller, no need for an add-in IDE controller, imo.

1. IDE1: Maxtor 120 Gig/UDMA133 + New Drive/UDMA133 (assuming) = no loss in burst/sustained transfer speed.

2. IDE2: CD-RW/UDMA33 + New Drive/UDMA133 (assuming) = New Drive burst/sustained transfer speed is limited to UDMA33 due to transfers through an IDE port being limited to the speed of the slowest device on the chain.

Regarding your current IDE2 set-up:

IDE2: CD-RW/UDMA33 (master) + CD-ROM/UDMA33 (slave) = neither device lowers the burst/sustained transfer speed of the other as they are both the same. Since CD to CD copy always uses temporary files on the HDD anyways, it makes no sense to put a HDD on the same IDE port as a CD-RW as there is no speed gain, only a speed loss for the HDD (assuming it's faster than UDMA33).

So, #1 is your best choice.

[muno]

Untrue, the devices in ide port set their speed to whatever they please. If you have a pio4 device in the chain, an udma133 device will still perform udma133.

[stroyal]

You could use the SATA controler with SATA/IDE adapters for your IDE HDs.

[BluesMan1]

Thanks for all the replies.

I was planning to use my second HD as Slave on the same IDE cable so it confirms my choice, i just wanted to make sure about it.

I have a SATA connection on my board but not planning to use it for now. After some friends of mine did some testing with a 7200 rpm HD they find out that there's no really increase of speed transfer unless you have a 10000 rpm HD, if there's any speed improvement with a 7200 rpm it will be in milliseconds.

One more question about SATA, if i'm connecting my second HD on it would it be as Master or Slave.....that i don't know.

muno: you're right about editing, i wasn't thinking about it at all

[stroyal]

It would be a master. One thing to check is ,my abit NF7S disables the secondary IDE slave when I enable SATA.

[BluesMan1]

Thanks stroyal for the information.