how does master and slave HD work?

Question

I was wondering if i get a slave drive a second one how does that work.? I hook it up to the second part of ribbon and proper jumper placement but i was wondering how does it work then? I mean when you boot to your master drive do you use the slave through that? i mean boot to first drive and use second drive through that OS?

Answer 1

I think I understand the scope of your questions. How do 2 drives talk through 1 cable?
The computer sees Primary Master and Primary Slave. They will take turns, and hence slow down your computer some at an almost unnoticable ammount. Two tricks is both drives are not often used at the same time.
When they are required to talk at the same time like transfering a file from one drive to the other thats when you could notice it going slower then usual because they do take turns talking on the same cable.
Say you transfer a 10 meg file from one to the other, 5 megs will go to RAM memory then 5 megs will go from RAM memory to the other drive then another 5 megs will go to RAM memory then that 5 megs will go to the other drive again... that's how both will talk through one cable.

I understand too you may be asking "how do i finish configuring / setting up 2 drives?"
Once you boot to your master drive open "My Computer" you should see a new drive letter something like C: (Master) D: (Slave) E: (CD ROM Drive)

You can use the second drive as a backup, coping important files to the other drive so if a drive fails you wont loose the files.

You can use the second drive to be your default program folder so all programs you manually install get installed to the second drive. This use to be more important with Windows 95 and earlier so when the Operating System took a dump and would no longer function you could just reinstall the operating system (especially if you did full drive backups) and save a crapload of time from having to install all your programs again.
This also use to be a good way to make your computer faster because your operating system could run on one drive by itself and all your programs and data could run on the other drive.
With the huge increase in hard drive size this isnt hardly any benifit nowdays.

That's about it, just the two uses for an extra hard drive.

Some of the other concepts you might be thinking of are called RAID. You need special hardware and / or software to do that though. If you have a SCSI RAID card and 2+ hard drives you can make the computer think it has only 1 hard drive... so when you add a hard drive the computer thinks your one hard drive increased in size. For example RAID 0 is called Stripping (may have mispelled that) where one data bit is written to one drive and the next bit is written to the next drive.. If you have two 100g drives your computer thinks it has one single 200g drive. RAID 0 sucks though cause if you loose 1 drive you loose your operating system and all your data so you basically double your chances loosing everything cause either drive could die and both die. All other RAIDS have redundancy meaning if one drive dies your data is protected but it costs space.
RAID 1 is mirroring so the first 100g drive is an exact mirror of the second 100g. If you loose one drive you still have all your data however you loose 100g. 100g + 100g mirror = 100g total space.
RAID 3 is three or more drives where one drive keeps track of all data. one bit on one, one bit on the other, one bit to mark what both drives have. So if it wrote a 1 on the first drive and a 0 on the second drive the third drive would record the sum of 1. 0 + 0 = 0, 1+1= 2. If you loose either of the first drives the one recording the sums can rebuild a replacement drive so you dont loose anything. If the drive recording the sums dies you can replace it and the other two drives will rebuild the sums...

The RAID levels get more complicated at RAID 3, 5, 10, and 1+10 and 5+10 so I'll stop here.

-Mike
1st Level Tech.

Answer 2

The motherboard has electronics to decide who's going be the default boot drive when you have them properly jumpered. That part of the electronics is the hard drive controller. The controller, in turn, talks to system BIOS. So, you will boot from C: (master) as a rule, unless another boot option is set in BIOS. The D: drive (slave) is just a big storage area, now. If the second hard drive is blank, (has no data on it) you can store whatever you want on it. If the slave has an operating system on it, it doesn't matter, because they aren't the ones loaded into memory.
The operating system, once loaded from the boot drive, will only reference it's own kernal, GDI and user modules; it is unaware the other operating system.

-best luck

Answer 3

The master/slave relationship is for the IDE controller only.

Generally you want the higher spec drive as the master.

You can make either of them the boot device. The BIOS ans OS do not see a difference between them.

I believe you can only communicate with one device on the bus at a time. So, if you have two hard files plus an optical drive, then put the hard drives as masters on the two IDE buses, and then put the optical drive as a slave on whichever is going get the least hard drive traffic.

Answer 4

If you place a blank hard drive set as Slave on the cable ribbon along with the Master drive that has the OS on it. You will access that slave drive through MyComputer in Windows.

Answer 5

The Master drive needs to be on the end of the cable. Then the next connector down the cable is the Slave.
You will have to set the jumpers on the slave to slave or cable select position.
You probably don't need to check the master jumpers but...
Make sure the master jump is set to master, master with slave, or cable select, but NOT set to single drive or something.
The instructions for where to put the jumper are on the HD itself in relation to the power slot just so you know if you have to turn the HD upside down or something to read the label you don't get confused.

Answer 6

you do no longer say what working gadget you're using, yet i will assume dwelling house windows. while you're using Explorer to repeat the record, then purely carry down the Shift key while dragging the record from one force to a distinctive. This strikes the record fairly of copying it. or purely reproduction it and then delete the unique, that's what 'pass' does besides.