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Thread ID: 47518 2004-07-28 17:26:00 Will an old harddrive slow down another? Greg S (201) Press F1
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256281 2004-07-28 17:26:00 Hi. I've just put together a PC using old parts, and have a spare hard drive. I was wondering if I stick it into this PC as a backup drive as Primary Slave will it slow down the PC's perfomance?

Primary Master is a Quantum Fireball (30 BG)
Primary Slave would be a Quantum Bigfoot CY (5.25) 4.3 GB (yeah it's old!)

This machine's raison d'etre is just a backup device to hold data, but is also used for some Word 2003 work.
Greg S (201)
256282 2004-07-28 18:21:00 PS ... It also just occured to me to ask if the PSU would cope with the extra drive. It's a 235w unit.

The machine has:
1 x floppy
1 x CD drive
1 x Hard drive
1 x 32 MB video card
512 MB SDRAM

Ta
Greg S (201)
256283 2004-07-28 18:53:00 if it's only a backup machine I doublt you'd notice any 'slowing down' at all also in regard to your psu .......that should be fine also cause it's unlikely that you'd be running everythign all at once....... drcspy (146)
256284 2004-07-28 22:06:00 >that should be fine also cause it's unlikely that you'd be running everythign all at once

that dosn't make much sence. the hardrive is powered all the time tho power manament can often turn it off when not needed. however it will still be running at the critical time, during boot up.

unfortunatly i can't say if the 235 watt psu is big enough simply due to lack of info about the pc. i doubt that just adding a hardrive would make a lot of difference unless the psu is well under sized.

as far as performance drop goes it is possible. exspecailly when mixing very old drives with new ones. i would stick the old drive on secondary slave as this would minimise any chance of slowing down the main drive.
tweak'e (174)
256285 2004-07-28 22:41:00 of course it makes sense the cdrom and floppy may not be being used all at the same time as the rest and depending on what you are doing the harddrive and or the cpu will either be largely at rest or running hard out perhaps which of course will demand more power drcspy (146)
256286 2004-07-28 23:34:00 Just a comment on Quantum Bigfoots and the older 1-6GB ones in particular. They should have called them fireballs instead because they regularly go down in flames with very little warning (although the Fireball drives weren't a lot better). So, be carefull what your backing up to it.

You can get a 40GB 7200rpm drive for around the $100 mark which is a small price to pay for peace of mind.

Cheers Murray P
Murray P (44)
256287 2004-07-29 01:02:00 I'm with Tweak'e on this one. Put it on the secondary slave because if you put a HD on the same channel that have different modes the faster one will drop to the slower ones speed.
Shouldn't think your power supply would be a problem. Sometimes in the bios you can set a delay for powering up a HD which would reduce the initial load.
mikebartnz (21)
256288 2004-07-29 02:21:00 Quantum Bigfoot's go up in flames?? OH NO!!!!!!!!

HELP
agent_24 (4330)
256289 2004-07-29 02:37:00 > Quantum Bigfoot's go up in flames?? OH NO!!!!!!!!
>
> HELP

I shouldn't be too worried - this drive was in my missus's old machine and it ran flawlessly for years.

Thanks all for the advice.
Greg S (201)
256290 2004-07-29 02:40:00 > I'm with Tweak'e on this one. Put it on the
> secondary slave because if you put a HD on the same
> channel that have different modes the faster one will
> drop to the slower ones speed.

In that case should I keep the CD drive as Master on the Secondary?

> Sometimes in the bios you can set a delay for
> powering up a HD which would reduce the initial
> load.

That's a good tip. Ta
Greg S (201)
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