new hdd?

samus · Post by **samus** » Sun Jun 08, 2008 9:16 pm

so i went to put some music on my hdd today and guess what.. i have about 100mb left on it. (40gig hdd) so, you can see my problem here.

i'm thinking my best plan right now is to get an external and just putting all my music and everything that isn't a program, etc on it.

or...

i get a new huge hdd and start over. which i've done... twice. blah.

what do you suggest i do? any better ideas are welcome as i'm still relatively new to all this stuff.

thanks.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Jun 08, 2008 9:20 pm

Either or...

I'd if you're strapped for cash, get and internal. If you have a little extra, you might as well get an external, it will be better in the long run.

In fact I have several that I use. Two of which are always connected to my main computer. And the fact that said computer is a laptop (80GB) it's pretty useful to have a 300GB and 120GB hard drive to run Warcraft off of and store videos/music on.

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Sun Jun 08, 2008 11:25 pm

Internals are cheaper than externals; problem solved.

Any computer made after about 1987 should support at least two hard drives.

There's no need to "start over" with a new drive, just add it in with your current drive. If it's an older PC, you can put a second drive on the same IDE channel with your current one, and set it to Slave mode, making sure your current drive is set to Master.

I don't know how much you know about this stuff, but IDE cables are the big, flat ribbon cables with 40 wires. They almost always have 3 connectors; one that connects to the motherboard, and the other two that you can connect devices to. Most computers have two IDE channels, supporting two devices each. My old Celeron that I'm on now has two hard drives on one channel, and two DVD drives on the other. And setting drives to "Master" or "Slave" mode simply involves changing the position of the jumper on the back of the drive.

If you have a newer computer, it should have at least a couple SATA ports on its motherboard. The current drive is most likely taking up one, and your optical drive(s) is/are probably on one of the IDE channels. If you have SATA ports, all you have to do is get a SATA drive, and plug in to one of your motherboard's SATA ports. Err... you might have to enable the SATA port you plugged your new drive into in the BIOS... I had to do that with my Dell. SATA cables are the much smaller cables, but that are about three times thicker than an IDE cable.

With a second drive, you can do the same thing you were going to do with an external drive. That's what I did with mine. All the program and system files stayed on my main drive, and I put my music, a couple games, and my anime torrents on the new drive.

If you really want an external drive, just get an internal one and a cheap external enclosure. They're only about $10, and overall should be cheaper.

samus · Post by **samus** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 5:51 am

thanks guys. btw, i have a sata hdd right now. and i kinda understand all of what you're trying to get at. and right now i can spend up to $250 this week.

just a quick question. I thought externals couldn't run programs on them.. but spark, you said you ran Warcraft on one. Is it possible to run programs off of an external?

specs: dell dimension e521 with amd athlon dual core processor and 2g RAM.

Thanks guys, I think I'm leaning towards making a slave drive. If I can partition my drive out of whim and no direction, then i'm pretty sure i'll be able to make a slave drive.

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 7:13 am

As long as you have at least one more SATA port...

500 gig Western Digital - $90
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... &CatId=139

I don't recommend an external drive. They're more expensive, often slower, and actually kind of pointless unless you have more than one computer you need to access the data with. (And even if that's true you can use file sharing to get to them over the network.)

gamemasterAS · Post by **gamemasterAS** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 1:09 pm

I would recommend against externals, maybe its just my luck but one of mine has died and 2 my friend had have died. I just don't trust them.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148135

That drive has plenty of space and it is very fast its pretty much seagates version of the raptor. The 32mb of cache on it make it very fast, I have been running on one of those for about 2 months.

And No one beats Newegg.

Chapel · Post by **Chapel** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 1:43 pm

samus wrote:just a quick question. I thought externals couldn't run programs on them.. but spark, you said you ran Warcraft on one. Is it possible to run programs off of an external?

I've run programs off of a 1Gb USB flash drive, so it is possible. The major thing that prevents this from being effective at all is the speed of USB.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 2:06 pm

I'm going to say some more here.

As I see it you can buy an internal and then buy an enclosure. 9 out of 10 times this method is cheaper then buying an external hard drive. Example would be the 300GB hard drive I have cost me about $80, the hard drive was about $50 and the enclosure was $30.

So like I said if you plan on moving this stuff around, or worse you reinstall your OS often. I suggest going with an external, it's more versatile.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 2:25 pm

samus wrote:just a quick question. I thought externals couldn't run programs on them.. but spark, you said you ran Warcraft on one. Is it possible to run programs off of an external?

It'll work fine if you only want to run the program on one computer, its when you want to run the program on another computer that you can run into problems.

samus · Post by **samus** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 2:43 pm

thanks, you guys have been really helpful. i think i'll order an internal all things considered.

soooo... how do i do this slave drive thing again??

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 3:08 pm

You don't have to worry about that with SATA.

But with IDE you can set the devices to Cable Select (CS) and they'll work it out. The device on the end becomes the master, the device in the middle of the cable is the slave device. Because only one IDE device can communicate at once, it's best to put your primary hard drive on a separate IDE chain than your hard drives if at all possible. This should help increase transfer rates. Usually you want to leave your main boot drive on its own, and put the secondaries on the other IDE bus.

Once you get the new drive up and running, you might want to set it up with a swap file. This should give you a slight boost in performance. Microsoft has directions here.

EDIT: Here's a diagram showing one possible IDE setup because I suck at explaining things verbally.

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 3:12 pm

You don't have to worry about a slave drive if you're not using IDE drives. You said your current drive is a SATA. Open up your computer, locate your hard drive, and follow the SATA cable back to your motherboard. If you have another port nearby that looks like the same one your current drive is plugged into, then you're safe to get another SATA drive (it's very likely that you'll have at least one more SATA port...).

Edit: Ah, Bic beat me...

Krepticor · Post by **Krepticor** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 3:50 pm

sata is not always the way to go

sata has an issue where the transfer speeds are faster than the hardware can track the data of the magnetic discs, not to mention XP is kinda meh to the whole thing, if you do get a sata drive use it for storage, no partition, unless you fork out the big bucks for those 10000 rpm things, and I know you aren't running vista so that makes the next argument void

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 4:22 pm

Krepticor wrote:sata is not always the way to go

But it's where the industry is heading.

sata has an issue where the transfer speeds are faster than the hardware can track the data of the magnetic discs

Um, buffer?

I've never heard of that issue.

not to mention XP is kinda meh to the whole thing

I've never had a problem with any of my SATA-equipped machines on XP. (Only 2000 and Linux.)

Electric Rain · Post by **Electric Rain** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 4:29 pm

^^^ Everything he said = seconded ^^^