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2nd hard drive question

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poncherelli2

Senior member
I currently have one 80gig hard drive as my primary master drive and am going to purchase a 160gig for extra space. I also have a dvdrom and cdrw on the secondary IDE. My motherboard has built-in raid for which I have not installed the drivers and am not really sure how to use. My question is would I be best off just putting the new 160gig as the primary slave? Also, I have the 80 partitioned to 15gig for C which holds windows and a few other things, and D which holds most of my programs and media files. Would my best bet be to make the new 160 gig entirely an E drive and move all my media to that, leave D for just programs, and leave C alone, or is 160 too big for a partition?

Also, i have a 300W psu, is this powerful enough for all this stuff? Thanks.

Ponch
 
If the drive is the same speed / cache size as the old one then I'd just put the new drive in as E and use it as a data store. If it was quicker than the old drive I'd swap it about and have it as the new primary. As for raid, I'm not 100% as I haven't used it myself so someone else maybe more clear but you'd only be able to raid up to 80GB (size of smallest drive), and not be able to use the remaining 80GB on the newer drive, which is a complete waste imho. I'm not sure you can raid partitions, if that's what you were thinking. Again, someone else will be able to clear that up who's more clued up on raid.

300w PSU, fine with your HD/optical drives as long as you don't have all PCI banks full, and a graphics card which requires it's power from the PSU. I use similar at home (3 HD's, 1 CDRW, 4PCI cards 1 AGP) on a 300w PSU.
 
As Snapster said, RAID capacity will depend on the smallest drive and performance will depend on the slowest drive. That's why people usually buy exact same drive models for RAID setups.

I would just setup the new drive as one big 160GB partition and move all your storage files to it. In order to do this you'll need your BIOS and Windows to be capable of 48-bit logical block adressing (LBA), otherwise the most you will see of you drive is 132GB, unless of course you set it up with multiple partitions each less than 132GB. Most relatively recent motherboard BIOSes have 48-bit LBA. If you are running an older board, check for a BIOS update. What version of Windows are you running? I don't remember if WinXP will do it natively, but service pack 1 will definitely add that feature. For Win2k, I think you will need SP3.

That being said, I think you should either create one 80GB partition on your 80GB drive or create one partition for Windows and programs and another for storage. I don't see any real benefit of having Windows on one partition and programs on another.
 
The 300wt PSU should be fine if it's of quality and I would engage the RAID in the BIOS (OS will detect and ask for Drivers that you can get from the MoBo's or RAID chipset site)...then use the 160Gig there as a single Master added Drive presuming the MoBo will handle it which most will.
 
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