On Installing New Hard Drives

I've just added a new hard disk to my PC and since I was having some problems with getting XP to recognise it I came here and one of your other threads fixed it perfectly. Thanks

There is one additional issue though (I'm making it up as I go along since I'm a digital caveman), I also saw some advice that said , and I quote -

Tsranch - 'Do Not, I repeat Do Not, put the optical drive on the same cable as a hard drive. Make sure you're using 80-wire DMA cable, and primary and secondary should be marked on the mobo. Possibly as IDE-1 and IDE-2 respectivly.'

Now I've got a mini tower with only 4 drive bays (2 small, 2 large) and since my floppy drive and primary HDD take up the two small bays I bought some brackets and installed the 2nd HDD in the spare 5.25 under the CD-RW and connected it to the secondary plug.

Is this likely to cause me any problems? (Warning! I only understood the first sentance of the quote!)

The PC is a 2.4 Gig Athlon running XP Home
Primary HDD is 40 Gig (I plan on using this for core programs)
Secondary HDD is 120 Gig (for games, MP3's and other multimedia)

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for the advice and the REALLY useful site!

 

Older chipsets used to limit the transfer rate of devices on the same IDE channel to that of the slowest device. This is not true of modern chipsets. If you have the mentioned 80-conductor cable you should be fine.

 

Thanks. I had worried it was a problem of trying to pour too much data down one cable (especially since games will be sharing the HDD and CD-RW).

I'll go back to lurking in the shadows then