How To Install A Hard Drive

Date Written: April 12, 2001
Writen By: Mark Hagan

Supplemental Instructions:

These instructions supplement the how-to video, so if you haven't watched that already than these notes probably will make very little sense.

First, be aware that the way IDE works is that only 1 device can communicate at a time on a channel, so if you have one device on the channel then this doesn't matter, but when you add a second device, that is something to take into consideration. You don't want two devices that will be heavily used at the same time on the same chain, if you can avoid it by using another IDE channel, then by all means do that.

Different devices transfer at different speeds, and you will want to match them as closely as possible on a chain to minimize your transfer loss. For instance, if you have hard drive that is ATA/100 on your primary channel, which is set to master (we are assuming your chipset supports ATA/100 too), and you want to add a second hard drive, which will be the slave, but it is only ATA/66 (you get a good deal on a used one). If you add the ATA/66 drive onto the same IDE channel as the ATA/100 then you will effectively be downgrading your ATA/100 to only be able to transfer to ATA/66. This may not seem that big of a deal, and sometimes you have to do things like that, but lets use a more extreme example. Suppose you want to add a ZIP drive, which transfers at like PIO Mode 2 (I think), this is very very slow compared to even ATA/33, so if you added the ZIP drive to a channel with a hard drive, you will see your performance go down the hole. CD-ROM's aren't as bad, most are ATA/33 (best case scenario), but they should be kept on a different channel than your primary hard drive.

With that said, if you are planning on building a system in the future, you might want to look into getting a board that has the two extra IDE RAID channels. Even if you don't plan on using RAID, the extra two channels can help you spread out the devices to maintain optimal performance.

Here's a few pictures that illustrate several common setups:

If you only have 2 devices:

If you have 3 devices:

If you have 4 devices:

So now that you know a little more about the physical install of the hard drive, the next section is for configuring it.

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