Secondary channel HDD...????

I have added a second Hard drive to my IBM Lennova. The primary IDE cable would not allow me to connect to the drive because of the length and location of the secondary connector in conjuction with the mounting location of the second hard drive, so I jumpered the additional hard drive as slave and connected it to the secondary cable in behind the CD/DVD player. All works fine.
Will this be o.k. to leave connected this way or do I risk something going wrong in the future being hooked up this way?

Thank you!!!

 

It should be fine, as long as the jumper settings are correct. The primary HDD should be master on the 1st IDE cable. The DVD drive should be master on the 2nd IDE cable, the 2nd HDD should be slave on the 2nd IDE cable. As long as all this is correct, you should be fine.

That paragraph above is more for people who stumble upon this topic looking for information. It sounds like you are set up fine and should experience no related problems in the future.

 

Thank you! Yes, the Hard Drive is showing up and I am using it for data storage. It seems fine and works great as I do have the jumpering set up that way. I just didn't want things to go wrong with the motherboard or something else power related because I didn't have the second HDD on the same channel ribbon as the master drive.
Thanks again!

 

i've found that theres only one way to find out if this setup is ok....to try it, because there are some hard drives that just wont work as slave on the same ide cable as a cd/dvd drive...in this case it worked, but sometimes it doesnt

 

I agree. I would assume it depends on the cable as well. Master on the end connection and slave on the second "middle" connection on the ribbon.

Thank you!

 

Interesting, I tried your exact same connections tarmin8or and my secondary HD ran extremely slow.

I think it is a case by case solution as smokinggun says. It just doesn't work well for the Dell I tried it in. I'm glad you had better luck.

 

The drive is a Maxtor 40GB that spins up at 7200. I notice I don't hear it spin fast unless it's being accessed and right now I only have 10GB of fonts archived on it. It doesn't run slow at all, I can click and access immediately.
Also, I am running it on an IBM Lennova Thinkcentre Windows XP Pro SP2.

 

Something to think about when you mix & match optical drives with a HD on the same channel.
DVDR Drives = UDMA2. (33MB/s)
HD's = UDMA5/6. (100 / 133MB/s)

That is the reason for the lag that sach2 mentioned, and may be the reason you do not hear it.
From that I take it to mean it sees the dvd drive as the master and that only allows the same speed (I think) on the hd