Adding Hard Drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Kunkel
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John Kunkel

If I connect additional hard drives to a PCI card with IDE controllers do I
have to run them in some sort of RAID configuration or will they just show
up as added physical drives?
 
John said:
If I connect additional hard drives to a PCI card with IDE controllers do I
have to run them in some sort of RAID configuration or will they just show
up as added physical drives?
Click to expand...

Nope, you can just use them as distinct physical drives.
 
Grinder said:
Nope, you can just use them as distinct physical drives.
Click to expand...

Thanks Grinder.

Assuming two IDE slots on the card, how should the HDD jumpers be set if two
drives are on one slot? If one drive is on each slot? Any advantages to
either?
 
If two drives are on one cable one should be master and the other slave. If only one drive is on a cable it should be master. In theory performance will be slightly better if there is only one drive per cable, but in real life you won't notice any difference.
 
Mike Walsh said:
If only one drive is on a cable it should be master.
Click to expand...


Why? My experience is that it doesn't matter, and I've found
no specifications or engineering literature to say that it does
matter. If you are using a 2-device IDE cable (i.e. 2 connectors
for hard drives), ATA specs say to put the single device on
the end connector (due to signal reflection concerns), and if
you're using Cable Select mode, the device on the end
connector will be seen as a Master. But there is no require-
ment that I know of that a lone drive *must* be Master. Indeed,
I have run lone hard drives as Slave, and they boot up and
function fine. I've even done that with a lone Master at the
center connector with no problem. The only consequences
of Master/Slave settings is that the BIOS puts the Master ahead
of the Slave in the default boot order (which can be manually
reversed via keyboard input to the BIOS), and when there are
two devices on one IDE cable, the two settings let the channel
controller tell the two devices apart.

*TimDaniels*
 
*** top-posting fixed ***

Mike said:
If two drives are on one cable one should be master and the other
slave. If only one drive is on a cable it should be master. In
theory performance will be slightly better if there is only one
drive per cable, but in real life you won't notice any difference.
Click to expand...

Some drives have three settings, master, slave, and 'alone'. Use
of 'alone' prevents a long timeout while the bios tries to detect a
slave on the same cable. 'alone' may have various labellings.
 
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