A few HD setup questions I've had for a while..

[Kuo]

Just thought I'll finally ask cause I'm too darn curious, haha. Also, most of these questions pertain to my specific rig setup, so they probably won't help anyone coming by for random questions/suggestions.. also some are rather far fetched things that probably have almost no significance but I've just been wondering.. heh

1) How important is giving breathing room to the HD? Basically a standard case (at least mine) has the HDs mounted one on top of each other, with like 2 mm of space in between. My case fits 3 in that configuration, and if I favored one drive over another, is there any "optimal" way to position them? (eg the middle of the three might go to my least favorite cause it's getting heat from top and bottom)

2) On that same note, I have a 4th HD mounted in my cd bay (w/ a HD mount). Do I want to give that drive breathing room too? Does the heat from a HD go up or down? Will there be any danger if I place it close to an optical drive? (I dunno, do optical drives release any type of wacky em field that might fiddle w/ the magnetic HD? I'm sorta pulling possibilities outa my ass).

3) Another similar note - do HDs really "overheat?" What happens when they get real hot? and what exactly is REAL hot?

4) How important are the screws for the HD? I know we want the HD to be as stable as possible, but one of the 3 HD slots I got in my case only has holes for 2 screws - 1 on each side (vs the traditional 4 screws, 2 on each side). Will that play any role in the half-life of my HD? (I dunno, more vibrations = earlier death?)

5) What about software that comes w/ the HD? How does that compare w/ Windows and stuff? For example, for a clean system that I want to build partition and format, how does the fdisk like program that Windows install uses compare w/ something like Maxtor's MaxBlast. Is there a preference in which I use? The lack of a easier to use GUI for Windows is a non-issue. Similarly, what about for existing systems. Windows Disk management vs installing MaxBlast or something like that. Assume that my BIOS can handle large disk sizes and all that jazz.

6) In the days of old, it was recommended that you put 1 HD & 1 optical on one IDE cable instead of 2 HD on one and 2 optical on one. I forget why (I think because you reduce the times you read and write from the same IDE channel), but is there any merit to this?

7) Maxtor (maybe some other companies, but I haven't seen them yet) has ATA133 HDs w/ 16 MB cache... I've seen primarily ATA100 from Seagate and WD. Maxtor supplies what they call an ATA133 IDE cable w/ the HD. Physically, they look identical to the ATA100 cable. Is there actually a difference in the cable? If so, how can I tell?

8) If I have both an ATA133 HD and an ATA100 HD on the same IDE cable, will both HDs work at their respective speeds, or will the ATA100 "bottleneck" the cable and drag the ATA133 HD's transfer speed down to ATA100?

9) Should I quick format or full format a new drive? Or in a way, what actually is the difference? I've heard two different things - full format actuall rewrites all the data to 0s while a quick format just tells the HD that it's all empty, while it's actually there, and the re-write is done as you use that space. If that's true for a quick format, what will the drive look like when you defragment it? Empty or a lot of fragmentted bits? Another thing I've heard is that the difference between quick and full is that a full simply performs a chkdsk first, and that there is no difference between how the format is done. Which one of these is true? (google will show you a link to both theories on the first page)

10) When creating multiple partitions from 1 HD, in the old days of DOS, you were only allowed 1 primary partition. All other partitions would have to be extended partitions created within a logical partition (or vice versa, I forget). W/ WinXP, you can create up to 4 primary partitions on one drive. Lets say you only want 2 partitions and you don't need another bootable partition, would it be better to Create the 2nd partitioin as primary or an extended? And lets say you do change your mind in the future - can programs such as PartitionMagic (or any other prog out there) convert an extended partition into a primary partition? Or basically create a 2nd bootable partition?

and I know I had some more questions.. but i can't remember them now.. so I'll ask as the time comes around

Thanks in advance for any and all replies, heh.

 

[defakto]

1.) at least a small amount of airflow makes ALL the difference in temp, even a few mm worth.

2.) Heat always rises, as long as there is airflow around the drive you're fine.

3.)Yes they overheat, they die when they overheat. Bearings can wear out faster silicon can go bad. It just makes alot more wear and tear on the drive.

4.) that slot is probably for a floopy drive, not a harddrive. You should mount a harddrive with at least 3 screws to prevent it from tipping or vibrating excessively, 4 highly recommended.

5.) I've never used manufacturer software for a drive, ever.

6.) If your running pata drives it's best to put both opticals on a different channel. Optical drives typicall are only setup for ata33 speeds, and lack the necessary conductors for ata100, as a result the controller will sense that there is a problem with the 80 wire connection and run the channel at the slowest setting, ata33.

7.) No difference that I know of, as long as it's 80 wires, you're fine.

8.) IDE runs at the speed of the slowest drive on the channel, so with a 133 and a 100 it will run at 100, this isn't an issue though because only one IDE drive can transfer at a time per channel and no ata100 or 133 drive hits speeds that would saturate an ata100 signal.

9.) I recommend full format on new drives because if there are any bad sectors they will be marked out during that process. A quick format just erases the table of the drive and doesn't do anything else.

10.) not sure on this one, I usually just do multiple primary partitions, i've never had more than 4 partitions on a drive for any reason though. The most I've had is 2.

 

[Kuo]

Thanks for the replies Great help.

Got another question I just thought about.

From the sticky "ANSWERS" in this thread as well as other websites, I know it's generally recommended that if you have multiple HDs you put them on their own IDE controllers. Of course though, that means if you have more than 2 HDs, they have to start sharing... unless you have a controller card.

Which is my question - if you do use a IDE Controller Card, does the same advice still apply? It probably does, but one of the reasons you did it was so no bandwidth would have to be shared. With the PCI controller card, you'll have to share the bandwidth of the PCI bus anyway. Does the bandwidth of the PCI bus exceed the IDE bandwidth that putting them on two different controllers would still help... or is the difference smaller?

 

[defakto]

A std 32 bit, 33mghz pci bus runs about 133 MB/s minus some over head, about 115-120MB/s. Now factor in sound card, onboard controllers are usually on the pci bus as well, as well as onboard nics, and what not. So a controller card with more than 2 channels could pretty easily max out your pci bus with all that on it, even if the drives only hit 40mb/s each.

The main reason you put drives on seperate channels is IDE cannot send multiple requests at once across a chain, when one drive is reading and seeking, it has control until it is done. ( This is my understanding of it as it was explained to me, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) With scsi the drives can actually "disconnect" themselves until the seek operation has completed and the data is ready to transmit, which is much more efficient at bandwidth usage.