Topic: Installing second hard drive

[Sandra]

2 Port ATA-133 PCI RAID Card
Requires Spare PCI Slot -- In stock (11/10/04 16:52)  £12.31 inc vat should do you Simon, from :

http://www.cclcomputers.biz/


Features
2 independent IDE/ATA channels
Compliant with PCI Specification Revision 2.2
Compliant with PCI IDE Controller Specification Revision 1.0
Support RAID sets (striped, mirrored, & mirrored striped) or Single Drive configuration
Supports up to four IDE/ATA Devices
Supports mixed drive manufacturers and capacities in the same RAID set
Supports large capacity Drives 137GB plus
Supports Ultra and Multiword DMA timing modes
CRC (Cyclical Redundancy Check)
128 Bytes Buffer
Built in 80 Pin cable detect circuitry
Supports Bus Master DMA at 133MB/sec PCI burst rate
3.3V Operating Voltage with 5V tolerant I/O
 
System Requirements  
IBM Compatible PC
Windows 98SE/ME/NT 4.0/2000/XP
Available PCI slot
Pentium CPU or faster
Minimum 64MB RAM
 
Package Contents  
1x ATA133 RAID PCI Card
1x IDE Cable
Driver CD
Installation Guide  
 
As I thought, it has its own BIOS which means it can overcome any hard drive capacity limitations of your original mobo/bios too  

[daveeb]

Having a second hard drive is great Simon, as Sandra says its a piece of cake to format/partition if you have XP.  the only downside i can think of is they do seem to fail more regularly when there are two, presumably due to the extra heat being generated.  

[Simon]

Thanks Sandra, that's great!    Looks like my credit card will be getting the dust blown off tonight!  

Dave, yes I had thought of the heat issue, but I have space for another 3 hard drives in my case   , so I can leave room for them to breathe.  

[Simon]

OK, I think I'm going to go for a Hitachi Deskstar 160Gb, but I can either have one with 2Mb Cache, or a more expensive one with 8Mb Cache.  What's the advantage of the dearer one?

[Sandra]

The cache acts as a buffer to write to/read from.
It should give a faster access time with a higher cache but I havent noticed any difference in parctice  

[Simon]

OK, thanks San.