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Hard drive question

B

board2death986

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2005
Messages
1,404
ok im a complete noob to hard drives and IDE cables but basically i only have 2 hard drives hooked up to my rig I don't know how else i could hook up any more internal drives but i was curious about getting an external drive, because that seems to be my only other option for now. . .so any suggestions on what i can do?
 
Is your other IDE channel occupied by two drives too? You should have enough IDE channels to support 4 IDE drives.

If not, do you have SATA ports? You could get SATA drives.

If not, you can buy a hard drive controller card for a PCI slot.
 
How many optical drives do you have?


EDIT: BillLeeLee beat me to it :D
 
yea using two HD's and two optical drives, I could prompt to make the burners external but i prefer to keep them inhouse. My mobo does have two sata ports. . . but could you explain what they are exactly? i only have a vague notion beyond raid configs. And would anyone actually suggest external drives? im planning to use this drive for media storage, movies, songs, etc, so if im playing straight from the drive i would need the data rate to be decent.
 
SATA is a newer sort of upgraded method kind of like how ATA (eg your current IDE drives) worked. It currently allows speeds up to Ultra-DMA 150, versus UDMA IDE being 133 tops. In reality, neither one gets near to the full speed of that unless you have the ultra-expensive, ultra-hot running drives like the raptors. IMO, it's not worth it. A well designed game loads everything to memory, so you really just get ever so slightly faster load times, and, with just a little patience, the hassle and heat becomes a waste of the money.

IMO, SATA is just a royal pain to get proper support for right now. My dad went straight to this when he upgraded to Athlon 64, and he's regretting it now. He has had a constant stream of problems from installation to running. The problems he's had are only just now finally starting to die out, probably a good half year since he bought that thing. Every now and then it still does it's old crash or refusal to start up properly. IMO, the support for SATA itself just is too new, and it's really better to wait for the technology to mature a bit more. I'm not saying SATA is bad, just that I really think it's better to give it a bit longer before jumping on the bandwagon. Besides, unless you spend ungodly amounts for the super-fast harddrives, you won't really notice a difference.

Now, on how you might arrange your drives, just to be sure, you do have your harddrives on seperates busses, right? Eg, one on the primary, another on the secondary. Officially people will say to have a burner on a different bus, but, I've found that you can get away with it -- which isn't horribly surprising considering that even DVD burners don't really try to manage any better than UDMA66 and can't really even do that. More importantly, when making transfers between those two drives, you will notice horrible slowness if both are on the same bus, versus them being considerably faster if seperated. I used to have two hds in my main system before I had to give up my download drive for the retrogaming system (man that was hard, I really miss those extra gigs...)

On external drives, frankly, you won't have much of a problem with transfer speeds unless you buy a real peice of crap. Don't go USB 1.1 of course, but, anything higher should be ok. If you can use Firewire, you'll get more consistant results out of that (I've seen tests, and while the USB 2 boasts higher max burst speeds, firewire can sustain higher average speeds over long periods.) Even DVD videos are under 1.5MiB/s, so you should be ok for streaming with anything you can throw at it. I think the main point of the really high speed ones is either so backups can be done more quickly (for example, it just wouldn't do if you start up the backup when going to sleep, then, when you next sit down to get to work it's still running) and things like captures that truly do need bandwidth (and here's where firewire really shines.)
 
thanks nazo, that was some great info. i can see that sata isn't really worth going into especially at this point. And yea i have my two drives set to master and slave (if that is what you meant by primary and secondary?). I think i have a firewire port on my audigy gamer soundcard, but i could very well be wrong, it just looks exactly like the firewire port i have on the top of my tsunami case (which i couldn't install for the life of me). Since im only using it for media storage, and possibly backup on occasion (only my windows partition, the rest are usually isolated from internet content) i should be good with USB 2.0 it would seem, but at least i have firewire available if i decide to go that route. Any particular brands of external you would recommend? i notice some are mounted vertically and horizontally, does the orientation have any effect on the hard disk? Also worried about heating problems, originally i was going to just buy another hard disk and mount it inside an external enclosure but i've heard that many have heating issues and that is one thing i've been trying hard to eliminate from my system entirely. thanks again for the help
 
No, master and slave are which part of the bus they are on. When I say primary and secondary, I'm referring to the two available IDE busses themselves (each of which has a master and slave.) I'm guessing from what you said that you currently have them on the same bus. If so, seperate them and you'll get much better transfers between and/or when things try to access both at once (eg game on one, windows on the other.)

USB 2 is the easiest to find and most officially supported. Just, like I said, despite promising such high maximum bandwidth, it rarely reaches that and more rarely can it actually hold it. I might try to dig out that link I originally found with the test where it was shown that firewire would hold speeds much more stable and end up being faster overall for anything more than short bursts (usb excels at bursts, even 1.1 can manage 12Mbps in a quick little burst from what I've heard.)

Well, on the Audigy 2, I know my ZS platinum has two firewire, one on the card itself, another on the front port. I know yours lacks the front port, but, you'll only want the one plug anyway since I believe it's just the one firewire bus. You said you see that plug, so I believe that means your card is among those that do indeed have it. And, don't worry about support. I find windows xp (at least sp2 integrated, I don't know about previous versions since I got the card after I started using sp2) supports the firewire on the card right off, and, more surprisingly, just about every linux distro out there seem to support it right off as well. I can't imagine yours would be treated any differently at all.

I think an official external HD will not have heat issues since it will be designed under the assumption of lesser heat dissipation. There are good quality external enclosures that would essentially solve any problems involved in heat, however, for your purposes, if you can afford a proper external harddrive, you will get better results with that (not the least of which being the fact that it will be a lot less of a pain in the rear to carry it around and such.) As for mounting positions, well, as long as the drive is designed to be able to handle it, it's ok. Don't mount one in a way it wasn't meant to be (I once tried mounting an internal HD upside down. Too bad I can't afford data recovery services, that really messed me up for a good long time.) I think the main point of the different mounting is just to get whatever is most convenient for you. I suppose the taller one would be more space savvy (especially when being taken and plugged into another PC.) It may be more prone to be knocked down by clumsy elbows though. Not good for a harddrive...

As for brands, well, Maxtor and Western Digital are probably the two biggest brand names in harddrives. Read reviews and such and you may find a good generic one however. This is where the newegg user review system comes in handy, eh? d-: All I can really tell you for certain is that all the maxtors I've had over the years have lasted me to the point that they by all rights should be dead. The only western digitals I ever had were really old and were pretty junky, but, either they were low ends to begin with, too ancient, or, western digital's quality has improved over the years because they seem to be known as a pretty good brand.

EDIT: Found the link:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/usb20vsfirewire/
I think firewire must be based around network technology or something. You'll note it's speeds being network related speeds, eg referring to the way it goes from 100, to 200 to 400 and everything treats it like a network adapter. Anyway, in those tests, you'll note that for real HD transfers, the firewire came out pretty darned close to the original IDE while the USB 2.0 was notably slower.
 
That will be $100 for my services. Uhm, you didn't forget to read the fine print earlier? I mean, it is only slightly smaller than one pixel large at 640x480, so, should have been easy enough. d-:

In all seriousness though, one thing I should be sure to point out is that you do need to be 100% sure you check reviews. Firewire has it's advantages, but, one of the disadvantages might be a little harder to get support if you have more unusual hardware. In other words, if you get something that needs some really weird drivers from some unknown company that goes under, you might be in trouble. I have a suspicion it shouldn't need drivers at all, but, I'm not 100% sure. Either way, do be careful in your selection.
 
luckily with newegg i should be able to RMA it if anything goes wrong, they are usually pretty good about that kind of stuff (except when it comes to LCD monitors). Im just going to browse around the maxtor and seagate externals, check out the ratings and reviews, im probably going to stick with 250 to 300gb. Anything less and i would feel like im wasting my time
 
Ice Czar said:
and a $100 fine for pimping your wares one the site,
you can send it in the form of beer to the administrative offices :p
Click to expand...
Hah! It's a dry county here, so I refuse to pay on principle that it would be a violation of local laws! d-: By suggesting I violate local laws, I hereby declare your claim to be invalid and nullified.

Gee, that almost sounds official or something. d-:


externals have a bad habit of getting bumped at the wrong time
Click to expand...
Right, that's the chief advantage to the one that sits flat. Not impossible to bump, but, the more that sticks up, the easier the target for those clumsy elbows. Of course, you can squeeze one of those "tower" boxes between tight spaces and they don't take up nearly as much room in this very horizontally inclined world. Beyond that, it's really more a matter of personal preference, but, IMO, you should get one that sits flat. You almost have a guaranteed flat surface of the approximate size and shape of that box, eg the top of the computer case. ^_^ Nice and stable that. Mind you, a few have kind of rounded tops, but, the other is no better there.
 
seems most people use these controllers for raid configurations, but does it work just as well if i dont use raid and just use the IDE connections for extra hard drives?
 
Nazo said:
Hah! It's a dry county here, so I refuse to pay on principle that it would be a violation of local laws! d-: By suggesting I violate local laws, I hereby declare your claim to be invalid and nullified.

Gee, that almost sounds official or something. d-:
Click to expand...

Worse than that, by my suggesting you violate local laws, I have violated the rules regarding discussing, suggesting or implying illegal activities and I'll have to write myself up :eek:

after I finsh this beer :p

board2death986 said:
seems most people use these controllers for raid configurations, but does it work just as well if i dont use raid and just use the IDE connections for extra hard drives?
Click to expand...

that controller doesnt have a RAID engine and its like any other drive in your system if a little tougher to have the BIOS point to one of them as a boot drive
also some opticals dont fare all that great on some

thats for hardware RAID of course
software RAID could still be done though we dont generally recommend that
 
i would like to go with these pci controllers but i dont think i have the room, wire management in my case is already a nightmare, which im grateful i was able to manage, but adding more IDE cables will make things no easier. . .so im going to go with external drives. But im still wondering if i should buy external hard drives or buy a regular HDD and put it in an enclosure
 
6 of one half dozen of another in my book
depends on what combos are available and what attributes in an enclosure your looking for
firewire and USB implementation was quite spotty a while back
and there are external SATA kits to enclosures (card to external port to enclosure)


as far as reliability goes, who has it, how well they handle them and how well the shipping goes is more important than make generally
 
For external drives, I recommend Seagates. They run pretty cool, have the best shock resistance of any 3.5" drive in case you do drop it, and ship with a five year warranty. Their performance isn't fabulous, but that doesn't matter on an external drive.
 
and I defer to DougLite ;)
who has kept abreast of developments far better than I
 
thanks guys, wow i got an adim and a moderator in my thread, the forums must be really going slow this afternoon eh? :p
 
well I look in on General Hardware regularly and relocated this
then I used to be the lead mod here in Data Storage until I pawned it off on DougLite

who like I once did, tries to answer each and every question :p
 
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