computer guts

  • Thread starter Thread starter dobro
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dobro

dobro

Well-known member
I'm thinking of getting a new hard drive (Quantum Fireball, 10 gigs, they're cheap and available here, but that's not the issue), so I took the lid off my computer and looked to see if there's room. I've got cables running to four devices (hard drive, CD-ROM, CD-RW, and floppy drive) but two of them share the same cable - three cables in all.

Question: Can I just add the new hard drive, or am I going to have to get rid of the floppy drive?

Question #2: What's this I hear about one drive being a slave drive, in the case of installing another hard drive? Slave? Master? Sounds oppressive.

Oh go on - liberate me.
 
okay, first off: the floppy is totally out of this equation; you plug a hard drive into the floppy cable (if it's even physically possible), you might not like the consequences...

You should be able to add another drive, you'll need another cable like the one hooking up the two devices (the cd drives?). Plug it in place of the one just hooking up on device, and with the extra connector, plug in the new hard drive. Whatever device (the first hard drive?) was already there should be set to master, and the new hard drive should be set to slave. Congratulations, you have now hooked up a new hard drive.

Next week: getting bios to recognize the new hard drive (if your's is a recently made computer, this should be easy), and the mysteries and wonders of FDISK. :)

Hope this is somewhat useful

William Underwood

P.S. the new hard drive will probably come with complete instructions on how to do all of this, if not, we're still here...
 
Hey dobro,

cwillu pretty much covered it all. I assume your using the new drive just for audio data?

Little more detail:

You have 2 IDE ports on your motherboard. Each of these can have 2 devices (hard drive, CD-ROM or 2 hard drives, 2 cd-rom's, you get the picture). On each port, each device will be either a master or a slave. This is determined by the jumper setting on the device itself - usually a little black plastic block on the back of the hard drive or cd-rom. A typical configuration would be this:

- On the primary IDE port - Your current hard drive set as master, on the same ribbon your CD-ROM, which is set as slave.
- On the secondary IDE port -Your new hard drive set as master, your CD-RW set as slave or vice-versa.

Not sure of your machine, but to get into the BIOS, hit the delete key when your machine is doing the memory count. Under "standard cmos setup" set everything to AUTO (if this is an option, most new boards it is, otherwise you will have to plug in the parameters manually for the new drive, which will be the secondary master or slave, depending how you jumpered). Exit and save.

You will need to fdisk and format the drive. If unsure of this, email me or post here and someone will elaborate on this.

Also, if within your budget, consider getting a quantum KA or KX 7200 RPM drive, big difference in speed.

Emeric
 
Right, this sounds like the grease, alright. Now, do I get and install the new hard drive and interrupt the recording which is on a roll right now, or keep rolling with the recording and the CD-RW backups? Silly question.

Thank ye kindly, contributores.
 
if you're going to use your new hard drive for audio recording i recommend that you install it as a "master" and not "slave".

master is faster
 
Sure, that's easy. Mr Lip from Bgkk, why do you suggest making the big, new drive the master rather than the slave?
 
Sure, that's easy. Mr Lip from Bgkk - can you give me a second opinion about why you suggest making the big, new drive the master rather than the slave?
 
Hi Dobro,
There ain't no such thing as master is faster. BUT! if you have to hook a new drive to a bus with a pre-existing CD drive it is best to mak it the master and the CD the slave. Your current C: drive will stay as the boot drive. Your new drive will need to have fdisk and format run on it to make it usable. Then you can start using it for music. Just redirect your software to save your files there. :D

Hope this helps

GRIZ
 
I had always been told that 'slave' has lower through-put than 'master'.

Maybe I was mis-informed.
 
Hi
I'm building a computer and have asked my brother (a whiz kid at this stuff not me) about what kind of hard drive to install. I have scsi onboard and his reflection on this is, EIDE are cheaper but only 4 devices can be connected up in one system. I know SCSI devices cost an arm and two legs so it's a toss up! As far as I know your floppy is the boot device for your system and you do need that to get back up and running. The price on large storage HDD have gotten more into all of our price range. Just a thought!!!
 
Help!! I dont have heat in my studio.
Not all bios use del to get into. Check your screen on bootup or your documention.
Primary=1st=master
Secondary=2nd=slave
Its easier than baking a pie (at least for me)
first off read the documention then when your
done with that read it again. Anymore hard drive manufactures have software with their
drives so just follow there direction. Its not like the old days when you had to drop down to a dos prompt by your self and do it
all your self (though I have a sneaky feeling you know how to use dos.) dos is not dead, bill gates just buried it alive!
I've seen your posts so I know you have at least a half of a brain (beats me by about 2/3rds) If You dont have that hard drive up within an hour you need to sell that dobro
and go to pc school. (Belay that order spock.
dont sell that dobro!)
Have all the faith in the world you will do it.
ColdDuckHead
 
Help!! I dont have heat in my studio.
Not all bios use del to get into. Check your screen on bootup or your documention.
Primary=1st=master
Secondary=2nd=slave
Its easier than baking a pie (at least for me)
first off read the documention then when your
done with that read it again. Anymore hard drive manufactures have software with their
drives so just follow there direction. Its not like the old days when you had to drop down to a dos prompt by your self and do it
all your self (though I have a sneaky feeling you know how to use dos.) dos is not dead, bill gates just buried it alive!
I've seen your posts so I know you have at least a half of a brain (beats me by about 2/3rds) If You dont have that hard drive up within an hour you need to sell that dobro
and go to pc school. (Belay that order spock.
dont sell that dobro!)
Have all the faith in the world you will do it.
ColdDuckHead
 
Steve - hmmm, I hadn't thought about the floppy drive being necessary for booting up the system - I think you may be right there. If so, then SCSI is necessary, which adds a bomb to the cost of the new hard drive.
Poo.
 
The hot ticket is a boot from CD! The computers at work have this feature built in and enabled.
 
Well, if I remember rightly, the guy who installed Win 98 for me formatted the hard drive, fdisk-ed it, then installed Win 98 from the CD. But Win 98 comes with a 'boot disk', a floppy to be used when the CD-rom doesn't work... emergency procedure, I assumed.

I stroll through my ignorance as if I own the place. :)
 
As far as I've gathered, you would want to have a SCSI disk for recording, as it is much faster. If you're only recording one or a few tracks at a time, IDE will most likely cut it but if you ever want to record many tracks at once or at a high resolution (24bit/96kHz as many soundcards are capable of today), you'd need a SCSI disk.

On my new computer, which I haven't tried for recording yet, I have a 9GB SCSI disk and a 25GB IDE disk. This way, I can store most of the programs on the IDE disk and use the SCSI mainly for recording. However, if you're getting the new disk simply for more storage (backups) and your old one is enough for recording, IDE will be enough.

Sure, SCSI is more expensive, especially as you need to get a SCSI card as well as the disk but I still think that you'll regret not getting one if you ever want to record more tracks at once or at a higher resolution.

Just my two lengthy cents

/Ola
 
The best feature about the SCSI is the amount of devices you're able to daisy chain along with the speed of it! I don't know for sure how many can run off one card, but the motherboard I've got for my homebuilt pc will support up to 30 devices. Alot of what I know is either from my brother or by the ole trial and many, many errors. Like I said before though SCSI HDD are expensive. Most cards I have seen come with internal and external connections.
 
7 devices per controller. Some cards will have multiple controllers, especially if they support multiple SCSI standards.

If your machine supports 30 devices it would mean that you either have 4 SCSI controllers and a single IDE controller or 3 SCSI controllers and 4.5 IDE controllers.

Regardless, the number of supported devices is a big plus when it comes to SCSI. I still don't feel that it's worth the money though. I can pay $30/GB or $8/GB...seems pretty clear now that 7200 RPM drives are so cheap...and 10,000RPM EIDE lurking right around the corner.

And performance? Hmm. Let's think about that. A low latency 7200 RPM EIDE drive will sustain transfers of 33MB/sec. No it will not reach 66MB/sec as the ATA/66 controller manufacturers would like you to think. Some day, yes..today no. You will see bursting at very high rates, but no sustained....blah blah. Let's just look at 33MB/sec which a 7200RPM drive can easily manage...and let's look at it in a situation where you're recording at 24/96:

24bits * 96,000 = 2304000 bits / 8 = 288KB/sec. Wow, a lot! Or is it?

33,000KB (33MB) / 288 = 114.5

On a perfect system that is only limited to hard drive performance, a 7200 RPM UDMA/33 drive should allow you to record 114 tracks at one time before it starts to completely choke out.

SCSI would allow you to record 300 or so tracks at one time, but I think we're getting into the silly range here.

It is my opinion that you will see the effects of CPU, bus, and soundcard lag before you'll ever see disk lag with a good drive. Of course you'd have to have one of those awesome 8-output 120-input soundcards that haven't been invented yet. They rock.

For real life recording information on this subject head over to www.prorec.com and do some searching on the subject. (sorry to mention your competition dragon but they do have some good articles there..and their BBS will NEVER compare to this one)

Slackmaster 2000
 
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