New Hard Disc type? I have little hardware knowledge

  • Thread starter Thread starter digerious
  • Start date Start date
D

digerious

New member
My once power proud system of 1.3Ghz, 512K RAM and never a glitch needs its whimpy 20GB HD upgrading in size. My manual says available devices are ata-66 ata-100 and ultra DMA. I don't understand what this means, can anyone help me select a drive type for best recroding performace. I'm gonna follow some advice I read in this forum for installing the new drive as a second drive. So while I'm on the subjest, how do I identify if I have unused IDE channels?

Much thanks

Andy
 
Easiest way is to tell what devices are on your IDE channels is to go into the BIOS settings on startup. Each channel can support a "master" and a "slave", and these channels are usually identified as 0 (Primary) and 1 (Secondary).

You want a drive which is ATA-100 and spins at 7200 RPM. Just about any desktop IDE drive currently available will conform to this specification, and it will be UDMA-capable.
 
separate IDEs

nice one! that helps a lot, thanks. Is it recommended that, if I have a spare IDE channel, that I install the new drive on that and not in a chain from the existing drive i.e two on one IDE?
 
put both hard drives on seperate IDE channels. Your system drive on the Primary Master and the recording drive on the Secondary master.

Any CD or DVD roms you connect to the primary & secondary slaves...this is done usualy by moving a jumper on the back of the CD or DVD rom.

So on a system with 2 drives and say a DVD rom and a DVD burner you have it set up like this;

System drive with jumpers set to MASTER on same cable as DVD rom with jumpers set to slave and the IDE cable in the Primary channel on the motherboard (usualy says IDE 0 on board)

Recording drive with jumpers set to MASTER on same cable as DVD burner with jumpers set to SLAVE and the IDE cable in the secondary channel on the motherboard (usualy says IDE 1 on board)

Hope that helps
 
partions

That's great help.

Do you have experience/knowledge of partitioning drives for audio work. My current 20GB has worked a treat unpartioned. I gather that with larger drives and the high frequecny of file creation and deletion (takes of a track etc), necessitates a problematic defragmentation and read quality. Any recommendations?

Andy
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top