Will This Work...Or Will It Blow-Up???

[offamychain]

I am getting tired of screwing my main computer up & having to reformat my HD. When it completely locks up, those restore points don't help much. There's nothing wrong with the system, it's just something wrong with me. I use this system for LOTS of downloads & LOTS of "experiments", which prove to be catastrophic about once every 2 or 3 months.

So, after my most recent reformat (yesterday), I decided to try to add a 3rd HD..to be used strictly for storing the semi-massive amount of useless data I don't like to lose.

I have a 2nd small HD already on the "slave" of the primary IDE, which is used exclusively as 3/4 of my system page-file. I don't want to change that.

What I am contemplating is putting the 3rd HD on the "slave" of the CD's IDE channel, with the CD being the "master", as it is now.

Will this work OK? This 3rd HD will be used ONLY for storage, so won't be accessed often & I can live with some lessening of CD performance.

Whatch ya thank?? Will it or won't it. Thanks.

[Welnic]

It should work. It won't slow the CD down, but the hard drive might run slower than it would if it didn't share the bus with the CD. I know that at one point putting a hard drive on the same bus as a CD really slowed the hard drive down, but with CDs so much faster now that might not be the case.

[offamychain]

I figured it would, but just wanted someone else to agree also.:D :D

I've heard about the slowdowns by doing this, but like I said, these 2 things (CD & 3rd HD) aren't used extensively & most likely will never be used at the same time.

[MerePeer]

I am going to do this soon too and so I asked one of our tech guys at work if the hard drive should be master to get better performance? His explanation was that it is not important which is master or slave, but what is important is to know that when sharing the cable they are sharing the (bus?) which means independently they operate fine but when used simultaneously (disk and cd activity together) they will be sharing the bandwidth/not as fast as independently.

[offamychain]

I'm definitely no Hardware expert, but figured that was the case. The 2nd HD as part of the page-file works real good on the same IDE channel, cause the computer can decide which part of the page-file is quickest to get to & will use that.
I don't know how it decides, I just know it does.:D :D

So that has those 2 hookups full. With the one CD, the other "slave" was the only place. I figure (if I can remember to do it) that storing, for example, the entire "My Documents" & "Program Files" folder onto this 3rd drive every week or two would be an excellent way to restore what you had.

Just reformat if you have to, reload Windows, then copy the 3rd HD onto the main one. Just like it used to be...minus the screw-up. I'll let you know if it works.:D :D