advice on installing hard drive

mattbailey · 25th May 2004

hi,
i recently acquired a 60Gb Maxtor hard drive, and was looking to fit it to my pc. my computer is a medion and already has a 120Gb seagate hard drive, and i was looking to make this 60Gb hard drive a slave, or maybe an external one.

upon opening the case, i noticed that there was a free hard drive bay, but the ide cables seem a bit beyond me. one ide cable has the hard drive and a dvd drive attached to it, and the other has just the dvd drive attached to it, and a slave plug free. could i attach my new hard drive to this slave plug? i read somewhere that putting a cd drive and a hard drive on the same channel is not a good idea, but it seems to work fine so far in my computer. also, after i have put it in, what would i have to do to get the computer to recognise the new hard drive?

im also a bit confused about the jumpers. on the top all it says is : jumper : j50, master, single:on, slave:off (in a small table)....on the back at the moment there are two jumpers, one positioned vertically at one end and one horizontally next to it. i presume its set to master, as it was the only hard drive in an old machine:how do i set it to slave?

and finally, i was also considering the possibility of making it an external drive with an exclosure. i have seen a lot of these on ebay, varying in price from Â£10 throught to Â£70+, and i dont want to spend too much. are they any good? is there a noticeable difference bewteen the cheap and expensive ones? anyone got one and want to reccomend me a specific model?

sorry, a very long post,
cheers in advance,
matt

**PeteC** · 25th May 2004

Matt,

As your 60 Gb drive is somewhat older than the 120 Gb I would hesitate to recommend putting both on the same controller - EIDE1. There is the possibility that the transfer speed of the 120 Gb would be reduced to that of the 60 Gb as they are unlikely to be the same.

I would set the 60 Gb as Slave to the CD drive on EIDE 2. The attached image is from a Maxtor installation sheet - does it look familiar ? Make sure the CD drive is set as Master - modern PC's with 80 wire ribbon cables generally use Cable Select, but play it safe here and set the CD drive jumper to master. You could make the HD Master and the CD drive Slave, but I doubt it would make any real difference - easy enough to change round later.

The HD should be recognised on booting the computer and assigned a drive letter.

Why spend extra cash on making it an external drive? - unless you want it this way and want to interchange it with other PC's. I can't give you any recommendations re. external drive cases - my guess is that the cheaper ones either have no controller or are USB 1 as opposed to USB 2.

I use a Maxtor 120 Gb One Touch External USB hard drive, but that's a slightly different animal!

BTW - post as much as you want - as long as it's relevant!