The circuitry of Desktop Computers.

[Peter_wadley]

I just popped open my computer towers case to check if I had an extra IDE input for an extra harddrive.. I have 3 IDEs..

How do you decide which device should be the master and which should be the slave?

Should the HD I use more often by the master?


I hadnt seen the inside of a computer since beginning electronics.. wow.. what a mind blow!

I cannot believe how amazingly complex the motherboard is.. well I mean I knew it would have to be complex but.. WOW!

So many ICs Some many Caps!!

It must take months and months (years?) to plan and design a motherboard.

 

[theinfamousbob]

For IDE stuff, I usually make my boot drive the channel 1 master. Extra hard drive on ch. 1 slave, and then either CDs or more HDs on ch. 2. As for the motherboard, the part that blows my mind is that it's usually a 4 layer PCB, not just 2. Crazy stuff.

 

[justDIY]

it's less of a problem today than five years ago, but adding a drive can change your drive-letter order, and possible disrupt your boot sequence.

if the computer is working now, it's most likely booting from ide0 (or whatever the first one is numbered), so you'll want to leave that one alone. ide1 is most likely your optical drive(s). you can add your hard drive to either ide1 or ide2, and set it to master. if you add it to an existing cable with an optical drive, make sure the optical drive is set to slave. the numbering of the interfaces has no impact on their speed or effectiveness, ide0 is not 'better' than ide1 or 2, unless you have a very low end systemboard where ide0 might be ultradma and the rest are standard speed (rare for computers built after '05)

 

[Sceadwian]

Master/Slave doesn't really matter where you put things in the chain, though like JustDIY said it does affect the default boot sequence this is relativly easy to change. Modern OS's could care less about what drive or partition they're installed to as long as there's a bios boot sequence that allows it's boot loader to do it's thing. Drive letters can often be changed from within the OS.
The IDE bus is pretty fast compared to hard drive speeds but if you want to transfer information between the two drives frequently or you intend to be doing a large number of reads/writes to both simultaniously from seperate applications it's probably best to make sure the two hard drives are on different IDE channels.

 

[Hero999]

it's less of a problem today than five years ago, but adding a drive can change your drive-letter order, and possible disrupt your boot sequence.

Only if you're using Winwoes and it can be fixed too with the more modern Windozes.

 

[Peter_wadley]

Hello,

Today I realized I still had my old computer which nobody was using!

I guess no one was using it since Id taken the PSU out and converted it to my bench supply

Turns out it has a 7GB HD, just the size I was looking for! (Important File Backup)

I took it out and hooked it up to my newer computer (XP)

It immediately identified the drive and listed it as F: .. I left clicked it in my computer and chose to Format. Changed its format from FAT32 to NTFS.

Works perfectly.. im surprised it only took about 10 minutes to do!

I also took the RAM and videocard out of that computer so I could upgrade my parents'.

They still live in the stone age w/ computing.. No matter what I say they will not change there current setup, which is:

133mhz pentium 2, 32MB RAM, 3GB HD.. ready for the kicker...

56K AOL internet. :O

Its sad really that they fear change like this.. but hey as long as there happy with it.. which it doesnt seem they are when downloading essential updates/anything really

ETA: 35 hours :O

 

[Hero999]

133mhz pentium 2, 32MB RAM, 3GB HD.. ready for the kicker...

Or you could install Linux on it and it'll still be useful for learning about UNIX, web browsing, email and wordprocessing.