Purchasing a Second Hard Drive?

I'm planning on getting a second hard drive if possible, but I'm keen to do a bit of research before hand to clear a few things up.

Mostly my fears are due to the size of the second hard drive and whether it'll be possible to attach it to my existing system. At the moment I have a 120GB drive and would be looking to spend around £60-£80 which seems to be enough to get a 200GB-250GB drive. Would attaching a drive live this as a slave to the existing drive work o.k. My machine is a few years old now and I have heard of problems with physical limits restricting the amount of hard disk space that can be used with older machines (possibly related to motherboards?).

Also general information about manufactures and drive types would be welcome. At the moment I'd be going for a IDE drive, as that seems to be the most common (and cheapest) type compared to others. I'd also go for a Hitachi drive as I understand they bought out IBM's hard drive manufacturing business and my existing drive is a IBM (plus I've heard things about some of the other manufactures, such as Maxtor drives being pretty noisy). Are these reasonable assumptions to make a purchase on.

Finally would now be a good time to get a new hard drive. I've noticed that the high end of drives sold by companies seems to have shifted from 350GB - 400GB to 500 GB whilst I've been looking. This is probably just the normal advances in technology, but there’s no chance that waiting a while longer before buying would reap massive benefits is there?

I'm no expert,but as far as I know slaving a bigger hard drive should cause you no problems,the only probs I 've had were with SATA.
Get one with a 8mb cache as opposed to 2,help speed things up.
You say your machines a couple of years old,so power supply may cause problems,what's yours.
Be a good idea to post your specs up.

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Originally Posted by SeK612

I'm planning on getting a second hard drive if possible, but I'm keen to do a bit of research before hand to clear a few things up.
An excellent idea.

Mostly my fears are due to the size of the second hard drive and whether it'll be possible to attach it to my existing system. At the moment I have a 120GB drive and would be looking to spend around £60-£80 which seems to be enough to get a 200GB-250GB drive. Would attaching a drive live this as a slave to the existing drive work o.k. My machine is a few years old now and I have heard of problems with physical limits restricting the amount of hard disk space that can be used with older machines (possibly related to motherboards?).
Assuming you have space in the tower to actually mount the new drive, installing it as a slave should pose no problems. There are limitations (which are software, not hardware) related to addressable size that are OS dependant, but I'm not very knowedgable about older OSs, so you'll need help from someone else on that.

Also general information about manufactures and drive types would be welcome. At the moment I'd be going for a IDE drive, as that seems to be the most common (and cheapest) type compared to others. I'd also go for a Hitachi drive as I understand they bought out IBM's hard drive manufacturing business and my existing drive is a IBM (plus I've heard things about some of the other manufactures, such as Maxtor drives being pretty noisy). Are these reasonable assumptions to make a purchase on.
I would recommend a Seagate drive.
In my experience they are quiet and reliable and also sport a five year warranty.

Finally would now be a good time to get a new hard drive. I've noticed that the high end of drives sold by companies seems to have shifted from 350GB - 400GB to 500 GB whilst I've been looking. This is probably just the normal advances in technology, but there’s no chance that waiting a while longer before buying would reap massive benefits is there?

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There is never a "good time" to buy anything PC related.
Technology advances so fast and prices change so strangely that you could spend eternity waiting for the "perfect deal".
Just get what you want when you can and live with the fact that it will be obsolete tomorrow and you'll be screwed.

There's a small chance that if your hardware is old enough it will not be able to cope with drives above 137GB, but that problem usually only applies to the boot drive. However, you will need at least (I think) Win2k plus SP4 or XP plus SP1 to use the full capacity. NT4, Win9x or ME are incapable of using drives of this size.

Specs are:

An AMD Athlon XP Processor (not sure of model, computer has it as 1.11 GHz)
512 MB Ram
Geforce MX 460 graphics card
120GB Hard Disk Drive
Gigabyte Motherboard (though not sure of model).

Software wise I'm running XP Pro SP2 :)

A few more questions.

Firstly interfaces. Some are ATA 100 others are ATA 133. Does it make much difference which of the two is used?

Secondly Maxtors drive seems to be the cheapest and has a bigger cache (16MB instead of 8MB). Will this make a big difference (Presumably having a bigger cache will increase the speed of the disk?).

Lastly as above Seagate does have a 5 year warranty compare to the three offered by the rest. They're also the more expensive (with a 200GB being priced around the same as the 250GB drives by the others). Is it worth paying extra and losing out on space for the longer warranty.

All good questions.

I recommend that you get and IDE Seagate drive. Preferably new. With a used one you risk buying someone else's troubles.

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Originally Posted by Virtualbody1234

With a used one you risk buying someone else's troubles.

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Or somebody else's porn.

ata 133 run faster

I think the ata 66/100/133 means 66/100/133GB transfer speeds and the S-ATA's go at 150GB.. or did I get the units wrong?

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Originally Posted by Shiranai_Baka

I think the ata 66/100/133 means 66/100/133GB transfer speeds and the S-ATA's go at 150GB.. or did I get the units wrong?

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It's in MBps. (Mega Bytes per second).

But that's the theoretical maximum bandwidth of the interface type. It doesn't mean that the drive speed is that fast.

I donno in UK, but in Canada a 300 Gig Maxtor 16mb cache ata 133 is only $130, so that would be only like 70 pounds british. Go with drives with 16 mb cache, as the cache do help alot.

Seagate + 5 year warranty = sweet
Western Digital + 3 year warranty = solid

Maxtor + 3 year warranty + extra buffer = :sick:

IMO Maxtor is like Intel, they offer the extra cache/buffer 'cause they have to :P

and maybe VB or clocker can correct me if I'm wrong, but,
didn't M$ address the 137 GB barrier way back in SP1/SP1a?
or is that still BIOS/mobo limited?

I believe you are correct, but do you know that SeK612 is running XP?

best drives on market are western digital. for ata, check out the caviar wd3200jb. 320Gbye storage and reliable.

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Originally Posted by clocker

I believe you are correct, but do you know that SeK612 is running XP?

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http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/showp...83&postcount=5

:P

No fair.
You did research.

I much prefer information be brought to me.

I went for the Hitachi in the end. It should arrive on tommorow.

Do I need to look into how to set it up (aside from plugging it in and manually changing it to a slave if needed) or will it be picked up by the machine like plug and play stuff is?

It's plug and play.
Once installed, just go to Computer Management>Disk Management and create the partition and format.
It won't appear in My Computer till you do this.

I've got it now and am halfway through installing it.

Since I didn't have enough power cables I've had to remove the power from my only internal fan so the drive can run.

This means at the moment I only have the heatsink and the power supply fan cooling the machine.

Is this sensible or is my machine now at risk of overheating.

I've had a look around and there seems to be a few solutions to the problem (such as a splitter for the existing power plugs, though I'm not sure how good they are).

For the moment as a quick fix I can disable one of my CD drives (having a seperate CDR and DVD Rom drive) if needed and use their power plugs.

I have installed Speed Fan to keep an eye on temps. From the default install it shows a temp of around 40 when minimised, however the more detailed stats "Local" getting as high as 51C (which is then accompanied by a small flame next to the temp) and HD0 getting up to 42C.

All these temps are without the second hard drive running (with it having power but no partitions yet) which will probably heat things up a bit) :(

I just had the same experience. Your machine will overheat.

Get power cables for your new drive as soon as you can and re hook-up your other fan. Two fans are much better than one. :)

Until then I'd watch it like a hawk. Unplugging one of your ROM drives will help keep you cooler until then, but it's rather like a bandaid on a broken leg.

Yea I got nervous and have reinstated the fan instead of one of the CD drives. Things look a bit cooler now, but the local does get up to 60C every now and again.

As you said I'm watching it, but I think more cables and new fans will be on the cards very soon :)

May seem a silly thing but while you've got it open clean all the dust and crap out,check the processer fan and heatsink for dust build up,I use a little artist brush to get all the nooks and crannys clean,then very carefully hoover all the dust out.
Some like to use canned air to blow the crap out,make sure to brace the fans if you do this,hold it to stop it spinning when your using the canned air