Switching to SCSI from IDE

I'm seeing the price of the Atlas 15k II 36GB drive dropping and I'm starting think about getting one to use as my OS and Program Files drive.

Right now I have a plain old IDE drive. What is involved in making the switch over to SCSI, I assume I'll need a SCSI PCI card since my MOBO does not have built in SCSI support?

If I take my current hard disk image and plop it on to the SCSI drive what difficulties will I encounter? I'm assuming there may be a conflict with SCSI drivers? I haven't been able to find any really good tutorials on the subject.

 

Copy the image over to the SCSI drive.

Then Insert your OS CD and do a repair install. When prompted hit F6 and install your SCSI drivers.

I can go into more detail if you need me to.

 

Will I be able to copy the image over without the drivers installed first?

 

I'll go out on a limb here and tell it the way I see it.

Because most of Windows loads at startup, if you want SPEED, you may be better off installing larger (loadup/access) applications onto the high speed SCSI drive rather than Windows itself (otherwise you may only gain a faster Windows loadup during boot). Windows would only need to access a harddrive if it is looking for something that is not already loaded into the RAM.

You could transfer the swapfile to the SCSI disk (Norton Utilities can set it to the "front" of the disk for faster access).

Don't have files on the disk that are going to "come and go" (eg. temporary internet files) that may defragment the drive...or...defrag often.

Another...if you run games and they must access the CD, try a virtual CD drive running from a harddrive.

Put "data" (save) files on slower drives if you can.

Matt

 

Thats a good question. See if Ghost will see the drive. If it does not then you will need to create a custom Ghost disk including the SCSI drivers.

The best thing to do would be to start with a clean install. Then just copy your important data over to the SCSI drive.

After your sure you have all your data then just format the IDE drive in disk management.

 

Chris H

Matt's correct. On the other hand, 36 mg is plenty for everything.

I have a scsi PCI card and the scsi BIOS is loaded after the mobo bios loads and before control is given to DOS to load windows. So the scsi drive just needs to be the boot device, or at least have fdisk or similar remove the active bit from your present boot disk, I think. But you may get a menu allowing you to boot from either - depends in the drivers.

Scsi drivers are installed when the PCI card is installed.

 

Hi sparrow, I don't know what Chris H would do with the redundant 320gb of IDE disk space though

From my experience using the SCSI adapter card utilities and the harddrive utilities should make setup easy. Problem I found was putting the drive on the correct cable connection and setting the ID number.

Matt

 

Matt,

Can't get anything by ya, huh?


But that wasn't what I expected a comment about!