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Several hard drive questions....

M

MagicMan17

Senior member
Hi all,

I am planning on installing a brand new 200 GB WD2000, 7200 RPM, 8MB cache. My existing drive is a 80 GB WD800, 7200 RPM, 8MB cache. I run WinXP Pro w/SP1. My mobo is an Asus A7N266 which already has 48-bit LBA support for large drives. I have several questions about installation and am not really an expert so bear with me...

1. Will making the new drive the boot drive speed up my boot and overall operating system smoothness? Is it worth the trouble?

2. How should I set up the IDE cables? I currently have my existing hard drive on its own IDE cable and the other cable hooked up to a master Cd-Rw and slave DVD drive. I have heard some people say that it helps performance if each hard drive is given its own IDE cable while other people say it does not matter and its actually better to put both hard drives on the same one. What is the best setup?

3. Because this drive was over 137 GB, WD included an Ultra ATA controller card. Do I have to use this card if my mobo and o/s can already handle this drive? Is there a need for it and will it help things run smoother?

4. Should I partition the 200 GB? If it is a good idea to do so, how many partitions should I make and at what size? What are the advantages of doing this as I have read some articles that it is not worth the trouble.


Thanks A LOT in Advance.

Prav
 
ok....
1. dont make the new drive your boot drive b/c the OS will not be on it.
2. you may get slight performance increase by making the new drive your secondary master and keeping your old drive on the primary master. not much though.
3. not positive on this one....I don't think you need the Ultra ATA card
4. a drive this size would probably benefit from a couple of partitions.......maybe 2X100......
 
dont bother with partitions, they will not make any difference in preformance and will be more truble then they are worth (not that they are worth much)
 
Alrite, so no partitions (or maybe just 2) but does anyone know about the controller card and any more opinions about the IDE setup?
 
Sounds like either drive would give you roughly the same performance as a boot drive. I'd guess it's not worth the trouble of moving your OS to the other drive. Be easier to add it as extra storage. Moving your swap file to the 2nd drive might improve Windows performance a bit (if it?s not on the same channel as the system drive).

Fast hard drives like these ones will run faster if they have their own dedicated channel. If you have enough channels, I?d so go for it and leave each drive a master with no slaves on their own channels, even if you have to use that controller card to do it. Make sure it?s at least ATA/100 though. You will noticed the biggest difference with dedicated channels when you stripe a couple drives. Try striping two drives on the same channel and watch the pathetic performance compared to dedicated channels. Hardly worth doing RAID if you use the same channel.

I?d guess the partitioning is up to you. Personally, I hate size limits. I?m always running out of room and resizing with partition magic later on. However, I do like having a smaller C: drive for my OS and applications and other partitions for data. It makes it so much easier to do a reinstall of my OS later on without having to backup my data elsewhere. Kinda like a safety net for when Windows eventually crashes and you can?t boot it. I hate taking a computer apart to put a drive in another machine and backup the data later. Course most of my critical data is on the server, but I back up my server to a large D: partition on this workstation. ;-)
 
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