HD question,PLEASE!

[Alon Brodski]

Hello world!

I have UDMA/33 HD as a primary master,CD-RW as a secondary master and CD-ROM
as a secondary slave.
The PC is Dell OptiPlex PIII.450 MHz,192MB,1999 edition.Interl BX chipset
I want to buy a faster and bigger PATA HD and add it to the system.I would
also buy a new controller PCI card and 80wire cable for it. So I have few
questions to ask here:
1)Are my 2 HD's would be on the same IDE channel? (I'm not going to connect
physically new HD to the motherboard,but to ext.card).
2) If yes...Would my older HD make my newer one work as UDMA/33,instead of
UDMA100/133?
3)What could be a solution?
4)Can My PC (BIOS,chipset,etc) actually support UDMA/100/133?

Thanks in advance,

 

[Bob Harris]

My own experience with a similar upgrade may provide some answers, or at
least some hope:My PC was a Gateway pentium 2, 450Mhz, 128 Meg RAM, win98
first edition, ATA/33 (UDMA/33) on motherboard. I added a Maxtor ATA/100
PCI card with two (2) controllers on it. I left the ZIP and CD on one of
the motherboard controllers, since they are slow devices. I added two
ATA/100 disks on the PCI board, both on the same controller, as master and
slave. The second controller on the PCI board was not used. These disks
performed far faster than the older ones, but then both were ATA/100.

If you do not get the full speed form the new disk, try attaching the old
disk to the motherboard. Or, get a PCI card with two controllers and attach
the old disk and a different controller from the faster one.

Alternatively, use the disk imaging softtware that usually comes with new
retails disks to transfer all the files (even system files) to the new disk.
Then boot wih only the new disk attached. Toss the old disk, perhaps after
doing a long format on it. I know that it seems like a waste to get rid of
a perfectly good disk. But, seriously, isn't the new one a lot larger than
the old one?

As for the BIOS supporting the new disk, that is more of a function of the
BIOS associated with the disk controller, not the BIOS on the motherboard.
For example, the motherboard may have a BIOS limit of 32Gig, but the
controller should be rated at least 127Gig (mine was, and that was almost
three years ago). Newer controller s can go into the tera-byte region (that
is beyond 1000Gig). However, XP can not handle that big a disk, unless you
(a) have SP-1 installed, and (b) enable 48-bit LBA in the registry.

 

[Alon Brodski]

Hey!

Thanks a lot for your advice!

From what you had told me I understood that if I have a UDMA/33 motherboard
and add a PCI ATA/100 controller card,then even though I won't get beyond
33MB/s (mainboard bottleneck),but still it would be closer to that
theoretical limit,than if I was using old UDMA/33 built in controller?

The reason why I don't feel like wasting an old HD has nothing to do with
space.I don't feel like wasting time to start everything again from the
scratch,nor do I want to use 3rd party software (that needs to be also
BOUGHT)
Partition Magic from Symantec now would cost me like $70 and a new HD like
80.So why bother?
2nd reason is that I'd rather have 2 different partitions- NTFS and FAT on 2
different physical disks.
The only unclear part is how to install Win 98SE on a second HD and to have
a multi boot enabled (after having XP already running).

Another question is....if I install that PCI card....what would happen with
master/slave scheme of ATA in my system? Meaning...I know that normally in a
system you have 2 IDE channels and you can have 4 units installed on them.So
if I add a new controller on a card-then what?I can have up to 8 units then
or not? (like 4 channels with 2 devices on each).And it also is unclear what
you meant exactly when you proposed me to experiment with my older HD to get
a better performance...Say if I have a newer one as a master on one channel
on a PCI card....then the older HD to put as a master on a 1st channel on
the motherboard?(same where it's now)
Or you meant that I should still put the older HD on a PCI card,but on a
different channel there (not the one with newer disk) and also put the older
disk as a master there?I would have like 3 masters in the system them

thanks in advance,

--
Yours truly,
Alon Brodski