Why so much slower using 2 drives???

This one is not so much a problem as a curiosity: I can't think of a reason why this hurts performance. This is an old Dell Opti 170L, a very common-as-dirt business desktop. It runs ok for its antiquity but due to file storage for a real estate office, and discomfort with giving up an old familiar stash of files, it runs with three 'drives': the old Fireball IDE drive, a much faster newer Barracuda 7200rpm drive [ide also] and a typical DVD/CD drive. There are three IDE headers: the primary drive is isolated on 0, and I've tried the other drives both on same bus and separated. Either way, my subjective observation is that the system responds about 10% better when that old Fireball is disconnected.

Why?.... The OS is Winxp Pro SP3 with the usual stuff. I keep Indexing OFF, as I do other things because it is such lame hardware. Apparently I'm missing a key item in my PC learning.... Why does it slow things down?

thx

 

My educated guess deals with both the overall speed and cache size of the older drive.

Some older (ancient) IDE/UDMA/80-Pin drives have data transfer speeds of 66 or 100 MB/s, versus the final generation of IDE drives that have a 133MB/s transfer speed.

The other issue is cache memory on the drive itself: A newer drive with 8-16MB cache memory has a bit faster seek/access time than an older drive with only a 2 MB cache.

If you want speed and the budget permits it, I'd considering upgrading to a newer PC and transferring the files to it. In addition to a CPU and memory that will run circles around your current PC, SATA drives can transfer data up to 20x faster (3GB/s) than old IDE ones.

Final thought: Given the age of the PC and the current hard drives, it is critical to keep a backup of your files on an external drive (if under 32GB, a USB flash drive will do). Based on age, your old IDE drives are in overtime; losing data due to one or both finally failing would not be fun.

Hope this helps.

 

without a doubt.
that's exactly where this deal is headed and the only reason I was fooling with it was to do what you said, make archive of everything so the office loses nothing in the event of a crunch. [btw... bestbuy has great deal right now on USB 3 WD Passport 750GB for a mere pittance: 59.95]

more precisely what has me curious is even if the work in progress is only seeking what's on the primary drive, the system is noticably slower merely having the 2nd/older one hooked up. There's something I do not understand and hoped to learn here. Slower bootup, slower operation. The older one is the former primary, so the entire Windows directory is intact as is the entire Program files directory. I was wondering if for some reason windows core operations are reading both but i dunno....

At any rate I've told the user: "no more money" spent on this old dog. Its served its master well but time to go. With the desktop market in freefall, I can get a modern off-lease system that is many times the power for $150 or less.

 

Grab 'em while you can. HDD pricing is going through the roof and shortages are possible this Holiday season.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=246218

Great idea. The only caveat is to pay attention to the number of connections (SATA and IDE) on the motherboard; I ran into one "off-lease" system board recently that had only 2 SATA ports and no IDE!

 

I REALLY like and have bought/used/sold MANY of the HP DCxxxx series. i've yet to have one die, although one of my own did lose the nic after a storm... not sure how that happened either... not a problem after popping in a usb wifi. [one of my past lives was in workstation development, another in server development, so know a bit about how things are designed/built/QC'd]

my personal daily driver is still a dc7600 win7 ulti x64 that is now 'long in the tooth' but is so quick, stable, quiet, hardy that I can't seem to flush it. although will soon as I'm going all notebook all the time... just waiting on a timelinex bargain to come by. desktop prices are falling so hard so fast that they lose value from one day to the next - I have a dell dimension sitting in the "out" part of the shop that I literally will give away - no one will buy it even at $5 lol.... but the better core 2 duo machines & such will still sell, howbeit in the 100 buck range unless they are very, very recent with win7 VALID licenses [that's another story]. Credit the success of Win7 and the onslaught of tablets with the certain death of the desktop market! These days, unless someone is just near penniless, I tell folks its better to buy a good older notebook than a good newer desktop - there's a persistent demand for reputable notebooks at every price strata right down to the breakeven for ship costs. fast moving game.....