Second Hard-Drive

[gmatov]

rallienavvie,
I missed this before, but you don't want to set the drives to "Cable Select" as this determines the drives status from where on the cable it is.
If you go cable select, the master will be the end drive, the slave will be the center drive, regardless which you prefer. Set one as Master, connect to the end of the cable, the other to slave, center of the cable. I don't know if there's any kind of a "hit" for CS, but this is the standard way.

[Karate Media]

gmatov

Can you clarify your post? When I installed my second HDD, a 120 GB drive, I didn't have to install an expansion card. I just plugged in the connector and the power, etc, etc, and onwards I went... From my understanding, an expansion card is only necessary (on current motherboards) for drives larger than 138 GB. What am I missing?

I haven't cracked open a retail/brand-name computer that was younger than 2-3 years old, but I've noticed that they seem to have limited, if any, available PCI slots. (EDIT: That is, except for my current computer, but it is a custom Alienware -- brand-name, yes, but obviously I mean the Dells and Gateways, etc., of the world in the preceding sentence)

Yeah, it's a Gumby question, but if our poster isn't familiar with the innards of his new computer (he sounds like he's fairly knowledgable, but you never know), it might be worth him checking out (at least based on my own limited knowledge) -- it would suck to get home, crack open the case, and find not a single PCI slot for his expansion card. (again, feel free to correct my thinking where necessary)

[gmatov]

karate,
No, you're right, they are putting so much integrated stuff on the board they feel they save mucho dinero by cutting the PCI slots. I gave one of my grands a 'puter with 2, count 'em, 2 PCI slots. They haven't done away with the AGP slot, yet, but if they get the videochips to speed, they probably will.
And, no,you don't need an expansion card for larger drives, but you do need the new, dated sometime in 2000, fdisk, or the entire new boot disk DL, from MS. I have said this before, I don't know if the newer OSs need it, 98 does. It will only recognize 64 gig, and if you try to fdisk-format, say, an 80 gig, it will only see 16 gig, and format the same. Whatever the size over 64, it deducts 64, a 120 will format as a 56 gig, 64 will not be seen. What's even more disconcerting, till you say to hell with it, I'm gonna try, is that in DOS, it will only show 5 digits, a 120000meg, 120 gig, actually like 117000meg, 117 gig, will show as 17 gigabytes, until you use up enough, making partitions, to get below 100 gig, then it will show the true remaining balance, in my case 97 gig, with the 120 I first ran into this with.
There IS supposed to be a glitch at the 237 gigabyte barrier, but I haven't gotten one of those yet. Matter of time. I will, by'm'by.
Hell, I just f'd and formatted 2 of the 160's I've been preaching about, no problem. I bought one of my daughters a 30 gig Max Diamond something or other, and had to do it half a dozen times to get it right.(Hers got et up by a virus, and since I gave the g'kids faster machs, with bigger HDs, figured, for 30 bucks after rebate, what the hell, But she is an adult, so she has to pay the 30 bucks,) Fdisk for 8 gigs C:\, format, and formatting less than 2 gigs. Completely lost the 5 gig D:\ drive for Win2k. You do know these things can make you crazy, right?
If he isn't familiar with the innards, I wouldn't say don't touch, as I would have a year or two ago. You could set voltages wrong then, and fry a CPU, or something equally as bad. If I were buying a board today, and I probably will, tomorrow, Saturday, as there is a show in town, I would definitely buy one with "soft jumpers", that is, all the jumpering is done in the BIOS. That is both bad and good. Good, in that you plug in a CPU, it sets itself up as to the spec the CPU says. Bad, in that, you have to work to overclock. Some boards are o'clockable, some are not. Personally, I do not o'clock anymore, the next speed is not that much higher in price.
In fact, if the price is right, I may go to a 2600 tomorrow in place of my 2000, if my board will support it. I know the machine I will migrate down to will take the 2000, but then, I need a box to take the 1800 in that box. And the last box is a 1200, so, shit, I guess I should just go to a whole new box,huh?
Mebbe I can give my slowest to my youngest g'son. Hey, he's already 3 weeks old, time I got him tapping on the keyboard.

[gmatov]

Karate,
Sorry to post so quick. ( Hell, I type so slow, I'll have to read half a doz before I get to this.)
What OS are you using. Most of my last had to do with 98SE. I install Win2k as a secondary OS, so don't really know if it would fdisk-format larger than 64 Gig drives.
On an aside, someone mentioned 4K clusters with FAT 32, in re: wasted space. When you go to a larger drive, it's no longer 4K, it goes to 32K, so for video, probably no harm, but for a 1K text file, 31K of "slack", ie, wasted space. FAT is 16 bit, like 640000 allocation units, so it can address 64000 blocks of data. Fat32 uses I think 24 or 28 of the 32 bits for addresses, so can address somewhere up to 16 million allocation units. So, you divide the total drive size by that number, and that will be the size of the "blocks".
It may be 4K, and it may be up to 32K, and if even larger, 64K. So, you can have a lot of slack, or wasted space.

[g_shocker182]

Have we verified that you have a free slot for the UltraATA card for the 160GB, and especially one that you won't want to use in the future (it seems that Dells, etc., seem to have a limited number of free PCI slots, and maybe you'll want to install, say, a firewire card in the future (if you don't already have firewire)...Just something to consider if you want to get a drive larger than 120 GB...

I have three open (PCI)slots as of now, but what I hate DELL for is only putting two memory card slots. Look like ill have to buy some bigger cards...

[rallynavvie]

I thought the reason you couldn't get larger than ~160GB was because FAT didn't support it right away. NTFS can support much larger HDDs. I never had a problem formatting my 200GB drive when I put it in so I guess I don't see what the big deal is about big drives.

As for cable select it's easier for me with how often I'm rearrangine my box to use CS since if you put the jumper to master and plug it in a slave spot it doesn't recognize the drive. I have 6 HDDs in my case (2 being SCSI so no jumper to set) so things can get crazy when I have to add another drive.

[Karate Media]

rally -- it is also a bios issue. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd look it up, but I know the FAQs on westerndigital.com go into detail about this. Supposedly, newer bios's will allow harddrives bigger than 137 GB, otherwise you need a controller card...

gmatov -- I have Windows XP on the main desktop, and use 4KB clusters -- there seemed to be a consensus that 4KB was a good median between speed vs. wasted disk space. The 120 GB slave is partitioned into a 1.4GB Virtual Memory drive, a 20 GB "DVD folder" drive just for final authored DVDs, and a 98GB-ish drive for capturing.

And it sounds like shocker knows his computer innards...By the way, how new is your Dell, and how much did you save by not getting the extra drive when you ordered the computer?

[g_shocker182]

And it sounds like shocker knows his computer innards...By the way, how new is your Dell, and how much did you save by not getting the extra drive when you ordered the computer?

paid $599 (yes, very cheap) for the dell about a month ago, i was going to built my own computer but once i added all the small stuff together things got expensive...

i plan to add on more memory, maybe that 160gb hard-d, and some other stuff. i never thought 60Gbs would be too small but as of now C: reads 1.4Gb out of 60 left.

[Karate Media]

i never thought 60Gbs would be too small but as of now C: reads 1.4Gb out of 60 left.

Ooohhh, yeah... I've got a 60 GB master, a 120 GB slave, and a 80 GB external drive, and I'm always running out of space...

And yeah, building your own never seems to be any less expensive (and why should it? -- I mean, dell's buying all those parts in bulk...) I was crunching numbers for a couple of months, thinking about building a desktop when the opportunity to buy an 8-month-old Alienware for $450 dropped into my lap (sadly, due to unfortunate circumstances) -- and I was able to add what I needed and still keep it cheaper than it would've been if I built it (or bought it brand new, for that matter...)