two hard drives and one dvd burner..best way to connect?

[tsantsa]

Ok, long story short, my boss gave me the work computer. It is an amd athlon xp 1800+. not a bad computer. It has a 20 gig hard drive and he kept his cd burner that was in it.

Now to my query. I picked up a 160 gig WD and am going to put my pioneer 108 in it (i got an nec that im going to put in the main computer). So I have 2 ide channels. Do I put both hard drives on one channel and the optical on the other? in doing so, with the remaining connection can I add another HDD if i were so inclined?

Basically what is the best method for putting these 3 components in this computer while leaving the possibility of adding another HDD at a later date?


TIA, I'm racking my brain, I havent had to mess with the guts of a pc for awhile.

[pfh]

Some will argue one way or the other. Performance this, blah blah that, yadda, yadda, yadda. For me it usually comes down to what fits best in the case. This is usually 2 hard drives on the primary ide with opticals on the secondary.

And yes, you could add another HD slave on the secondary ide.

[ViRaL1]

I concur.

[tsantsa]

Cool thanks. Thats how I had it connected until I started second guessing myself! Thought I'd 'ask the guys' so to speak.

[madvideos]

cool? Exactly.. might want to add a couple more fans if you add more drives. I got 6

[madvideos]

oh also look at your power supply, make sure it has enough connectors. You can get the splits at a fine computer store, no not best blah.

[hellbringer]

you could put windows on the 20 giger on primary channel and leave slave empty, then put other harddrive and optical on the other channel just a thought. chances are u won't notice much thow

[normcar]

If you are encoding, the best would be to have the 2 HDs on seperate channels. Then read source video from 1 drive and encode to the other drive. It would also be best if the operating system were on a 3rd drive that is not used during other operations.

[tsantsa]

You know, I had heard that it is best to have all programs running on a different hard drive and have the OS on a disc all by its lonesome.

How effective is doing this? How much of a performance boost can there be? For instance, this pc has 512 mb corsair xms ram and an amd 1800+ processor. By doing this, would there be a difference in performance?

[pfh]

Real world performance gains would not be noticed plus this kind of advice is dependant on intended use.
Most times these references are more for reasons of backup, security (sort of), defragging, re-formatting, re-installing the OS, organizational needs, and not nesc. for performance.

[tsantsa]

ahh, I see. thanks.

[normcar]

I was assuming that the programs are on the same HD as the OS. I have never heard of anyone running programs from a different HD from the OS HD. The important consideration is reading and writing of the video should be on different drives.