A7N8X SATA and IDE drives?

[Chris Wilson]

I now have a stable and fast Asus A7N8X De Luxe board with 2 Western
Digital Raptor 36 gig drives paired in a Raid 0 array, formatted NTFS
These of course are on the two SATA sockets. At the moment I have CD
player / recorder as master on one IDE socket, and a DVD player on the
other IDE socket, again set as master. I would like to add a large
storage hard drive, the bigger the better, but do not want this to
impact the machines performance. How should I go about this and any
suggestions as to a drive? I'd like it to be seen as Drive D. OS is
Windows 2000 Pro. Thanks.

 

[David P. Greer]

I now have a stable and fast Asus A7N8X De Luxe board with 2 Western
Digital Raptor 36 gig drives paired in a Raid 0 array, formatted NTFS
These of course are on the two SATA sockets. At the moment I have CD
player / recorder as master on one IDE socket, and a DVD player on the
other IDE socket, again set as master. I would like to add a large
storage hard drive, the bigger the better, but do not want this to
impact the machines performance. How should I go about this and any
suggestions as to a drive? I'd like it to be seen as Drive D. OS is
Windows 2000 Pro. Thanks.

This is how I did exactly that on my system:

Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the raid array.

Unplug the optical drives from the IDE connectors. Install your large
hard drive on the primary IDE connector. Start your system. It will
recognize your new hard drive as the D: drive (your raid should be the
C: drive.) Format the new drive. Shut the system back off.

**Then** plug in the optical drives on the secondary IDE connector, with
one as master, the other as slave. Restart your system, and it should
now show your new hard drive as the D: drive, with the optical drives as
the E: and F: drives.

Pretty simple. It worked like a charm on mine. Good luck with yours.

 

[Ben Pope]

I now have a stable and fast Asus A7N8X De Luxe board with 2 Western
Digital Raptor 36 gig drives paired in a Raid 0 array, formatted NTFS
These of course are on the two SATA sockets. At the moment I have CD
player / recorder as master on one IDE socket, and a DVD player on the
other IDE socket, again set as master. I would like to add a large
storage hard drive, the bigger the better, but do not want this to
impact the machines performance. How should I go about this and any
suggestions as to a drive? I'd like it to be seen as Drive D. OS is
Windows 2000 Pro. Thanks.

If you do disk-to-disk copying of CDs, on the fly, then leave the opticals
on seperate channels.

Before installing the hard drive, ensure that your CD drives are not using
D:
Admistrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management

And as mentioned before, that your boot order has SCSI before HDD0

I would probably go for:

Primary Master: New HDD
Secondary Master: CDRW
Secondary Slave: DVD

But I tend not to do much CD to CD copying on the fly.

I'm a bit partial to WD myself as, like you, I have a Raptor.

I think the best bang for the buck is ~160GB drives, 250GB is available.

Ben

 

[Jbob]

If you do disk-to-disk copying of CDs, on the fly, then leave the opticals
on seperate channels.

Before installing the hard drive, ensure that your CD drives are not using
D:
Admistrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management

And as mentioned before, that your boot order has SCSI before HDD0

I would probably go for:

Primary Master: New HDD
Secondary Master: CDRW
Secondary Slave: DVD

But I tend not to do much CD to CD copying on the fly.

I'm a bit partial to WD myself as, like you, I have a Raptor.

I think the best bang for the buck is ~160GB drives, 250GB is available.

Ben

One problem Ben if I may. Doesn't putting an optical drive on the same
channel as a hard drive slow the (u)DMA of the channel down to the speed of
the slowest device which is almost always the optical drive? Thus slowing
the hard drive down a bit! I have read this but not sure. I have always
used my optical drives on same channel and stopped using CD to CD copy years
ago because of errors although that problem may have been eliminated with
the newer burn-proof drives.

 

[Ben Pope]

One problem Ben if I may. Doesn't putting an optical drive on the same
channel as a hard drive slow the (u)DMA of the channel down to the speed
of the slowest device which is almost always the optical drive?
Nah.

Thus slowing the hard drive down a bit! I have read this but not sure. I
have always used my optical drives on same channel and stopped using CD
to CD copy years ago because of errors although that problem may have
been eliminated with the newer burn-proof drives.

Indeed... I still have an old CDRW so don't bother.

Ben

 

[Chris Wilson]

If you do disk-to-disk copying of CDs, on the fly, then leave the opticals
on seperate channels.

Before installing the hard drive, ensure that your CD drives are not using
D:
Admistrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management

And as mentioned before, that your boot order has SCSI before HDD0

I would probably go for:

Primary Master: New HDD
Secondary Master: CDRW
Secondary Slave: DVD

But I tend not to do much CD to CD copying on the fly.

I'm a bit partial to WD myself as, like you, I have a Raptor.

I think the best bang for the buck is ~160GB drives, 250GB is available.

Ben

Thanks for the tips, I bought a WD 200 gig EIDE drive today, and I put
the two optical drives on the secondary EIDE controller, and the new
hard drive as master on the primary. Set BIOS to boot SCSI first, and
all was fine. Using Disk Manager I then reset the drive names so the new
hard drive became D: instead of F:

It seems to be working fine thanks to all.

 

[Ben Pope]

Thanks for the tips, I bought a WD 200 gig EIDE drive today, and I put
the two optical drives on the secondary EIDE controller, and the new
hard drive as master on the primary. Set BIOS to boot SCSI first, and
all was fine. Using Disk Manager I then reset the drive names so the new
hard drive became D: instead of F:

It seems to be working fine thanks to all.

No problem.

Thats why my CD drives are like H and I, gives me breathing space on my
partitions, without messing up any installs that require access to a
particular drive letter for a removable device.

Ben