Adding a secondary hard drive
Adding a secondary hard drive to your system requires some careful and delicate procedures and the most important part is the one you perform before the actual, physical process. The most important step is to evaluate what your new hard drive can deliver. You shouldn't look at the storage space as this is really not that relevant. Your main hard drive can do just fine with only 3 gigs of space. What interests you most is speed: speed of access, seek time, latency and most important the number of rotation per minute or RPM. With these issues in mind choose the best hard drive to store your system partition on. Once you have chosen the best hard drive you must transform it into a master. An IDE master to be more exact. Simply put the jumper on the hard drive on the master setting. There are easy to follow instructions shown on the back of the hard drive. OK, maybe not that easy and not exactly instructions, but you will figure it out eventually When adding a secondary hard drive it is best to let the best of the hard drives alone on an IDE cable. This will ensure that you get the most of it, because you see the IDE bus will act accordingly with the lowest speed device found on it, so putting a CD-ROM on it along with your brand new hard drive is a rather stupid thing to do. If you really have no choice put the two hard drives on a single IDE cable, with the main system hard drive on the master setting and the other one on the slave setting. By no choice I mean the fact that all four IDE slots are occupied and even then you could quite easily transform the slower hard drive into an external hard drive, but that's an entirely different story altogether. It is very important that once you complete your little hardware escapade you let your computer know about it. Your computer is actually very smart and can do this work all by itself. It only needs a little guidance. So go to the BIOS (or CMOS) setup and run the IDE auto detect feature and let your computer figure out what hard drives and other IDE devices now has. Of course you might experience some hiccups during installation, so if you ever encounter problems and your computer doesn't detect the hard drives properly simply shut the computer down and check that all cables are in the right place. You should also be aware that some older systems cannot recognize hard drives bigger than 139 gigs of space. With these issues in mind I hope that you will successfully add your second hard drive to your beloved computer system.
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