2nd HD question

R

rydin4life

New Member
I have a 60gb WD in my pc and I just put a 2nd WD in,this time 250gb for storage. my pc seems to boot the same but is slower in pulling up "my computer" and takes a few extra seconds to show my data even though I only have like 20gb of stuff on there so far. They are both IDE drives set to cable select on windows xp SP2 with 512MB ram and a P4 3.06ghz. Is this just normal because I'm loading a 60gb master, a 250gb slave, and a 400gb USB my book for backup? My docs always loaded quick but I had them in a folder right on the desktop on my only hard drive at the time. Now it has to follow a shortcut to a 2nd drive and load things, so I guess its normal, just wanted to see if I could speed it up any.
 
that's normal

it has to parse each drive, think of how much longer it takes the 'save to' window or 'my computer' to open if you have a cd or dvd in one of your drives
 
I'm not really sure but..

o Check the connectors.
o Try reinstalling your OS.
o Update your motherboard driver.
o Defrag all the HD you have.
o Tweak BIOS settings. (Very risky)

Good luck!
 
xBoom said:
I'm not really sure but..

o Check the connectors.
o Try reinstalling your OS.
o Update your motherboard driver.
o Defrag all the HD you have.
o Tweak BIOS settings. (Very risky)

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Reinstalling the OS? No thank you! The only time bios settings would have to be changed is when dual OSing the system to assign a second drive as the first boot device.

The lag seen when adding additional drives as well as the usb drive mentioned is to be expected. Often you would have to set the slave if not both ide drives to the cable select position for some boards. Many prebuilt systems especially eMachines will see the single HD set to cable select. If the drive has been properly partitioned and formatted you should get should get used to the slight drag in a short period of time. That's why SCSI and Sata drives were invented to speed things up when acessing storage devices.
 
I doubt that there will be any way to remove the lag. The only suggestion that I can see from xBoom that I can second would be to defrag the drives.

Adam
 
Defragmenting a all hard drives is part of normal maintainence anyways. That should be done right after installing and removal of any and all programs to insure the best there. But a lag can even be seen when using an ide host and going to explore a sata array. This is just part of the time needed for Windows to ready the access to all drives it detects.

With two drives and two versions of Windows running at the moment you can see a lag there whenever opening MyComputer or Explorer. Windows immediately begins scanning all drives and folders on them for the total. The better your system is setup initially is the only way a reduction in that amount of time will be seen. The actual time is only a matter of seconds where you won't be annoyed by it after awhile.
 
That should be done right after installing and removal of any and all programs to insure the best there.
Click to expand...
that may be excessive, best to defrag monthly and that is all.

But a lag can even be seen when using an ide host and going to explore a sata array.[/QUOTE
any lag experienced is not due to this reason
Click to expand...
 
One of the best things to do after a full install of Windows and all of the softwares you intend to run is a defrag followed by the periodic maintainence to keep fragmentation down to 0%. If you make several changes by adding or removing programs in a brief period of time or simply add and delete a number of large files a quick defrag after analysis won't take long. The idea of keeping the fragmentation down under 5% works well.

A lag with a sata array can obviously be caused for driver problems as well as a few other things. What I was referring to there was the brief period of seconds seen when Windows is given instructions(like opening MyComp or WE) to display all drives. Windows will then see those seconds used for as you will hear the fans also speed up as the supply is also drawn on then.
 
Well, I have all data copied that I wanted to the second hd, so I think everything is how I want. I'll go ahead and de-frag both and run my reg-cleaner to remove anything that was changed from switching data around and see how it goes.
thanks..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top