Multiple Hard Drives

[clocker]

A friend gave me several old PCs, victims of a spousally decreed basement cleanup, which I have stripped for hardware/parts.

One interesting part is a Seagate 40GB HDD unit.
It is an older, 5200RPM model.

I am currently running a WD 7200RPM HDD.

I realize that should I connect the Seagate as a slave on my primary IDE channel that my faster drive would slow down to match the Seagate.

I also have a PCI slot IDE adaptor card.

My question is...if I leave my faster WD HDD as a solo master on the primary IDE channel and hook the slower Seagate to the PCI based adaptor card, will the faster drive still have to slow down?
I can see how this might happen when the system is reading from the Seagate, but what about when it's not?
I don't really need the space...my WD is 160GB and I have plenty of room left...I am just curious.

[Virtualbody1234]

I'm quite sure that the drive won't slow down if connected to the card.

I'm not even sure it would slow things down if connected as a slave. Are they both ATA100 or ATA133?

[clocker]

DMA/ATA 33 Ultra?

[Virtualbody1234]

Use your PCI card and do a benchmark test before and after to see if speeds change.

[ck-uk]

I think i'd agree with vb mate.To be honest clocker i wouldnt use the pci bus ,esp'on a hard drive,all they do is bottleneck the rest of your components.Say you start doing a lot of activity n before long your cpu memory n agp well everything will be just be hanging there waiting ,probably even start causing probs and carshes.Pcis imo are just about fine for the odd small device or an office comp or something which isnt constantly active or a changin system,unlike most of us lot.I would say sound cards will soon become borderline before long esp' gaming having to keep with the rest.

Anyway theres only one way to find out is try

[clocker]

Thanks guys.
As I said, this more in the the line of theory rather than practice.

It turns out that I mistyped the model number when I did my original Google search and this drive is only 2.5GB.
Hardly worth the effort, even as an experiment.

What I'd really like is a 40 or so GB SATA drive to use as my primary and use the big WD as storage.

[Virtualbody1234]

Ok, that makes sense now. I was wondering why a 40gig drive would be ATA33.