2nd Hard Drive. L2 TLB

I'm trying to get a handle on 2 Qs that I searched for, didn't find, and prob have been answered one{thousand} time.

1) I am ordering a 2nd Samsung 40gb 5400rpm ATA 100 hard drive to use as a mirror backup. Is the 250W power supply in my ATX midTower case brawny enough to run 2 hard drives, 1 CD-RW, 1 DVD ROM and 1 floppy drive? Not at the same time, of curse.

2) My 256k L2 cache is enabled in Award BIOS V6.0. But after benchmarking my sloooow speeds, I see that the Instruction and Data Translation-Lookaside-Buffer(s) {TLB} 2M/4M byte pages are "Off ", per CPUID. Until I learn more, this is mostly fruit loops to me. Is there another way to fully Enable the L2 besides pulling my CMOS battery for a few hours and reset/redetect? I've photographed the BIOS settings and am ready to go, after another cup of coffee.

 

Sorry, I do not know the answer to your specific question; but, I do have a comment on your selection of hard disk. My experience has been that Samsung hard disks are slow and usually contain very little cache compared to other brands. I would suggest IBM, Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum and Maxtor--in that approximate order. I would suggest you get one that has at least 2 Megs of on-board cache, also know as buffer.

Also, my experience has been that Samsung seems to me to have a higher failure rate than other brands.

 

Thanx Alex, even tho this Samsung SV4084H has 2mb cache, I'll shop around; i don't want to get a slow, short-lived HDD.

 

Hi RexB,

Found this thru a google search http://www.xtrememods.com/articles/athlon4-2.shtml Am not familiar w/ TLB, so went looking to see if it is something that should be "turned on" in an AMD cpu. If you do a search yourself, you'll find a mountain of information for other cpus (especially 64 bit) before you come across anything for AMD. Seems having it on reduces latency for main memory accesses!

Tin

 

Thanx for the hotlink Tinknocker, I'll go a-lookin' at that info. My previous searches of the AMD power supply reqs listed for the Athlon 1.4 had p/s from 200W - 350Watts with so many different Latin configurations that I bogged down in confus&*!?ion. I'll take better notes this time 8)

That disk access time with the TLB off must be exactly what is causing this machine to benchmark slower than my Celeron A. 8( Just not excited about resetting the BIOS L2 cache by having to take the battery out. . .