Installing 2 hard drives onto the same PC!

[mitchwilliams]

Hi guys,

Just wondering, i have got alot of films and alot of music on my main pc now and have fairly little space left.

I was just wondering, this could be a very dumb question but here goes....

Could i install another hard drive on the same computer?? I have a old pc that i dont use with a large hard drive, wud i be able to install the hard drive of my old pc onto my new computer to add more space?

Is this possible?

Thanks for any help.
Mitch

[Capmaster]

Sure. If it's an IDE drive, just remove the jumpers (if any) from the little pins on the back and cable it up. You'll need to probably tell your PC to sense it, unless you have autodetect enabled. Try it first and see if it sees the second HD.

I would recommend putting it on the secondary channel with your CD or DVD drive if you plan to move a lot of files between it and your main HD. It's faster that way.

[iooi]

Yep.

Just add it as a slave drive. You might want to format it to remove all the old stuff on it, but if you are running XP then you can do it via windows. So much easier than have to mess around with the other ways.

[mitchwilliams]

Hi Capmaster.

Thanks for your speedy reply! Just one more dumb question from me! Im not that technical with computers as you can probably tell!

I would recommend putting it on the secondary channel with your CD or DVD drive if you plan to move a lot of files between it and your main HD. It's faster that way.

I dont really understand this part? Do you mean insert the second hard drive in the second slot available? Is that the secondary channel?

Thanks again
Mitch

[Capmaster]

Hi Capmaster.

Thanks for your speedy reply! Just one more dumb question from me! Im not that technical with computers as you can probably tell!

I would recommend putting it on the secondary channel with your CD or DVD drive if you plan to move a lot of files between it and your main HD. It's faster that way.

I dont really understand this part? Do you mean insert the second hard drive in the second slot available? Is that the secondary channel?

Thanks again
Mitch

No. Slots are irrelevant. If you bought your PC already set up, it probably has the Main HD on the IDE primary channel, and the CD or DVD drive on the secondary channel, both as masters.

You will see two rather wide cables coming off the motherboard and going to the existing HD and the CD drive. Each cable will have 2 connectors. The empty connector on the cable going to the CD is where you will want to install your second HD. The slot doesn't matter - just mount it wherever you can so the cable reaches it.

When you reboot, if your motherboard autosenses (probably will), it'll see the secondary IDE slave drive as being the second HD, and once it starts windows you can verify that by going into explorer and looking for the new drive letter. Check the capacity reported, and that should do it

[mitchwilliams]

Thank you very much. Thanks for all your posts, this has helped me

Ta Mitch

[Capmaster]

Thank you very much. Thanks for all your posts, this has helped me

Ta Mitch

Mitch,
Let us know how it works out. It's nice to know if our advice actually works ...hahaha

[DVD_Ripper]

If your nervous about jumping into you PC's guts think about a Firwire or USB External Drive.

If you have a firewire port (for DV Xfer) you can use it for an external drive access.

Since your machine is old it may only have USB 1.1 ports (too slow for HD xfer) so a third party V2 USB Port Card would be needed.

Just an option or two....

[alchemistresearch]

External is a very good choice because you can use it as an off-site backup.

[rkr1958]

I would recommend putting it on the secondary channel with your CD or DVD drive if you plan to move a lot of files between it and your main HD. It's faster that way.

Just curious about this ... why do you recommend putting the drive on the same channel as the CD/DVD drive versus putting it as slave to the other harddrive? Wouldn't the drive run significantly slower being on the secondary channel with the CD/DVD drive?

[gmatov]

rkr,

If you intend to rip and convert DVDs or avis with this machine, second drive should be on Secondary IDE.

Just what the hell DO you want to do? Rip DVDs? Convert? What?

If you have a DVD ROM to rip a DVD, it should be on your Secondary, rip to the C:\ drive, operate on it, send the resulting file to the new drive on the other cable, send the completed work to the DVD burner to the Slave on the Primary IDE, no IRQ problems, one drive asking permission to read or write.

Heirarchy is usually Primary Master (C), Secondary Master(D), Primary Slave(E) (Burner), Secondary Slave(F) (DVD ROM
Rip from F to C, convert from C to D, Burn from D to E. No collisions, no taking turns talking, as only 1 device on a cable can use it at a time. No duplexing, here. Kinda like a walkie talkie, push the button to talk, you can't hear.

Cheers,

George

[rkr1958]

rkr,
Just what the hell DO you want to do? Rip DVDs? Convert? What?
George

I was just curious ... Actually, I have 4 Hard Drives, DVD+/-RW and DVD-ROM drive. 5 of these 6 drives are internal (4 IDEs & 1 SATA) and the other is an external firewire harddrive. Anyway ... each internal drive is the primary drive on its own channel. I added a PCI IDE controller card so I didn't have to slave any of the drives.

Anyway ... I always thought it was a bad thing to put harddrives and DVD/CD drives on the same channel together. Wouldn't this be bad, for example, if you wanted to capture?