moving hard drives on ide chain

[thedarkcrow]

OK...

Here is the layout

DVD-ROM Chain 1 Master
DVD+/-R Drive Slave
Hard Drive 1 Master (Drive C Boot) Chain 2
Hard Drive 2 Slave Chain 2

Then I have Hard Drive 3 connected to SATA via an ide/sata adapter.

My DVD-ROM drive died, and the way I have HD 3 hooked up on the power chain is poor I think, as when you run a fair amount of programs that drive seems to want to spin up.

Anyways can I move Hard drive 3 up to that first slot on chain 1, or will it then attempt to boot as that is the first device it sees,
or will it know that the boot sector is on Hard Drive 1 which is lower on the chain?

Thanks for any help.

 

[V00D00]

You can move your hard drive, but it's not a good idea to have any kind of cd/dvd drive on the same chain as a hard drive.

The drives on a chain run at the same speed, so when you put a hard drive on there with a dvd rom or something the hard drive only goes at ATA-33, so it's severly decreasing performance.

I would say your setup is fine the way it is.

If anything, move Hard Drive 3 up to chain 1, and then move the DVD-/+R drive down to the SATA one.

It's controlled in your BIOS which hard drive it boots to. Just be sure you have it set to whatever drive you have windows installed on and you won't have any problems.

 

[thedarkcrow]

Hmm okay, I guess then the main problem is the "spinning up" of that last drive. When you start a game or several programs are open, hell even suddenly using the scroll button on the mouse while viewing a web page causes the drive to spin up. And you can hear that noise which is becoming very annoying

It maybe because it the far down on the string as far as power connectors.
I really dont want to unhook everything and rewire from scratch.

But buying an Antec 550 watt power supply I thought it would be able to handle distributing the power more easily.

I am concerned that it may also be the ide/sata converter I am using causing what seems to be the power spike to "spin up" the drive. But I am out of ide slots except for the one that goes with the dvd burner...

If that hard drive three is mainly just for storage (it almost full as it is) could I get away with having it on with the dvd drive I wonder

 

[V00D00]

spinning up or grinding away?

When you turn on your computer, all the hard drives should spin up and stay that way.

The spin-up noise should be constant, but seek noise (from when the heads are moving around looking for the data) will come and go as you access the data

If the drive is constantly spinning up and stopping, then there's a problem somewhere. I've never heard of any drives that do that.

 

[tk11]

Drives on the same cable used to run at the same speed but that's not usually the case anymore so you shouldn't have to worry about that.

If you have a drive that's constantly spinning up then you should change your power managment control panel to prevent the drive from spinning down in the first place.

You don't seem to have a power problem... so I wouldn't bother changing anything aside from your power saving settings.

Moving drive 3 up to the primary ide will probably mess up your drive letters.