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Multiple hard drives & bootable disk switcher.

N

NiteMare

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2003
Messages
190
I'm going to be setting up a rig and I have no experience doing anything this big, so I wanted to ask questions before I did anything.

I'm setting up a PC to be both a personal computer to futz around on, and a media center to do video and music editing. What I intend on doing is setting up two 40gig hard drives to boot from and hooking them up to a switch. Which brings me to my first question.

Are there any affordable hard drive switchers out there? I'd like to be able to put a button/flick a switch and change which hard drive I boot from so I don't have to manually change them. But the only switch i've seen is nearly 300$, I was wondering if there are any more affordable ones for home use available?

I also will have four hard drives hooked up. One will be a USB 200gig for backup/storage, two will be 40gig harddrives to boot off of, and one will be a 160gig specifically for media storage, namely DVD quality video.

I have never hooked up more than 2 hard drives, but I see another IDE plug, so I am assuming I take another ribbon and plug it into there with my extra hard drive attached. Or is there anything special I need to do?

My last question involves power. Right now I have a USB hub with five switches, A keyboard(musical type), a joystick, soon a 200gig USB hard drive, a printer and a couple other devices, along with a radeon 9800 and 512ram. Will adding 2 more hard drives along with all of that sap my power? right now the powersource I have is a 450watt. Will that be enough to supply power?


Thanks in advanced!
 
Why not just use a boot loader? Just about every OS has one, even if it is hidden from you, or you can always just use LILO or GRUB. Here is how to use the NT/2000/XP one: http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2337

Also, USB doesn't draw power from your PS, your USB drive should have it's own power plug. (well a tiny bit for signaling and powering small 5v perifrials)

As for adding IDE drives, if you are hooking two to the same cable you will have to set one to master and one to slave, and you will have to partition the drives.

==>Lazn
 
I figured going with two seperate hard drives would be better. or atleast cause my media programs to run alot faster.

and what I ment is hooking up three normal hard drives, would I do anything special, other then put a second ribbon in the slot next to the primary hard drive IDE cable?
 
NiteMare said:
I figured going with two seperate hard drives would be better. or atleast cause my media programs to run alot faster.

and what I ment is hooking up three normal hard drives, would I do anything special, other then put a second ribbon in the slot next to the primary hard drive IDE cable?
Click to expand...

Boot loaders work fine with separate drives.

Each IDE channel can only have a max of two drives on them, and if you are just putting two drives on one chain and one drive on the other, no you don't have to do anything special beyond master/slave on the channel with two drives. Just make sure you set the correct drive as your boot drive in your BIOS. (the one with the boot loader on it, if you decide to not spend the $300)

==>Lazn
 
Oh, I dont want to spend 300 dollars. I was wondering if you knew of any that were abit cheaper.
 
NiteMare said:
I figured going with two seperate hard drives would be better. or atleast cause my media programs to run alot faster.
Click to expand...

Are you talking about my partitioning comment or my bootloader comment? Because you have to have partitions on a drive, even if it is only one big partition per drive. Once you put the drive in and it is blank it will not show up in "my computer" untill it is partitioned (it will show up in device manager though) the way to partition it in XP is to use "Disk Management." (as I said before, bootloaders work fine with multiple drives, you just choose which to boot from on startup, usually with a countdown to a default so you can boot it and walk away if you want the default boot)

==>Lazn
 
It was to the bootloader comment. I've set up PC's before, and new disks. I've just never put more then 2 into a computer.
 
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