2 Harddrives 1 computer?

Question

I have a compaq with a 40gig and its about 500mb free from being full so i pulled a 80 gig from my old emachine and i wanna use that in my compaq so i added it to my comaq makin the 80 a slave....now i wanna transfer my files well my music and vid to the 80 gig but use the 40 gig to hold my computer sys files....do i need to format the 80 for it work they both now have windows xp...what do i need to do

Answer 1

As long as you are going to all that trouble to put another drive on the new machine you might want to see what is on sale lately. I saw that Microcenter on the Internet has a 250 gig drive for $49 after rebates. Comes the day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday) I expect a bunch more great sales. Keep an eye out for a biggie at a low price.

Answer 2

Unless your hard drives are on seperate channels (like if they were SATA for instance) the IDEAL situation is to have one drive per channel. Chances are the 80 gig has a faster spindle speed (spins faster) and has more cache (built-in ram) than that old 40 gig. So what you should really do is format the 80, image your 40 gig to the 80 so it's an exact duplicate of the 40 gig (software is available from any hard drive manufacturer to accomplish this), and chuck the 40 gig in the trash (OR get a USB External enclosure for it and use it that way if you need the space). The answer as to why lies in how the PATA (commonly called ATA100/ATA133 or IDE) bus works. The PATA bus works in such a fashion that it can only perform read/write operations on ONE device per channel at a time. This means when it's reading data from one drive, the other sits silent. When the cache is empty it reads more data while the OTHER drive waits. Then the back and forth process begins again. This is a real killer for disk I/O performance and should be avoided if at ALL possible. To be honest, 80 gig is kind of small anway. 250 GB hard drives with 16 meg cache buffers can be had for less than $100 online from popular retailers such as newegg.com, tigerdirect.com, or zipzoomfly.com and would outperform that 80 gb by a substantial margin.

Answer 3

Since you pulled it from your old machine, I assume that you have already transfered any files and programs you wanted to keep.

if not then make EXTERNAL copies before you do anything else.

Then I would re-format the drive, followed by "fdisk MBR" to clear the "boot record" on sector 1. Then you would have the full 80Gb, (less the "overhead" required by the disk.

Now that you have 2 drives, you can easily back-up regularly, and even schedule them to run themselves without you being there!

I would then make more than 1 partition out of the drive, and use it for programs and data OTHER than the OS, (except for backing up the OS!)

As suggested, if possible, I would put it on a separate cable from the primary drive, but at current speeds, any "delay" would hardly be noticeable.

I see no reason to spend money for a drive if you do not have to, and if this solves your problem, so much the better.

I still use old DOS systems with 10Mb drives for some uses for which they are sufficient!!

Answer 4

since your old drive probably has windows on it, I would format it and make the most of the 80 gigs, then transfer music afterwards, then you can also uninstall large programs on 40 gig and then reinstall then in the 80 gig also, just format the 80 gig within windows

Answer 5

yes you will have to format the new 80 gig drive, or you will have two copies of XP trying to load... to format the drive click Start, then Accessories, then windows explorer. on the file tree right click computer, then management, then disk management. you should see your main HD & your slave. right click the slave then format... The only thing you might run into is the system might not see the new drive. but if your system already see's the drive then no prob....

Answer 6

Only if you need room your computer will be running on the 40 the 80 is storage,if you do not need the DATA on it go to my computer highlight the 80 go to file in the left corner do down to format and format it. you end up with 80 GB blank.

Answer 7

Its been awhile, since I have done that. The 40 should still be recognized by BIOS as the primary master, and it should boot the system. I doubt you will have to format the 80.

Answer 8

you should b able to just move them over. If you are having hdd reading probs mak sure the jumpers r set right, that ur 40gb is on master and ur 80gb is on slave, that should work from there on

Answer 9

for mate it then make sur its the sam os then when all that is done then in my computer you can copy it all over. music wise i do not know i have not figured it out yet.