2nd HDD problems

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duster_do_little

New Member
I had an I/O Magic 250gb external HDD in which the power cord was really loose and kept turning off and on, so I decided to take the HDD out of the case and just run it as a second HDD in my computer. I took it out, set it up for slave, plugged it in to my computer and on reboot it went through the process of setting it up. The computer recognizes the HDD, but whenever I try to transfer to it from the other internal drive, or from my external, the computer will start to lag really bad. I decided to test a video on it and the audio seemed to slur every once in awhile. I tested a video from my external HDD and it was doing the same thing, just not as much (normally it runs fine). I shut the computer down and unplugged the 250GB HDD. On rebooting, the external drive ran fine.

The specs on my computer are 1.81 GHz AMD Sempron 512mb ram, 100gb Seagate 7200.7 Barracuda, DVD Burner, media card bay, added soundblaster audio card, added 256mb AGP GEForce 6200 OC'd to 375MHz, 300 watt power supply (upgraded from like 250 or 275). The external HDD that I'm installing is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9.

Is it possible that my 300 watt power supply isn't enough so when I have the 2nd HDD plugged in it's straining the rest of the system?

Any help would be great. Thanks!
 
You can always try higher rated power supply. What brand is the 300 watt you have now?
 
It's just a Bestec

I don't really wanna put more money into this computer though, I was just hoping it would hold me off until I built up enough cash to build one, or just buy a decent Asus all in one. About a month ago I bought the video card for $30 (didn't really make a noticeable difference vs the onboard video car) and I bought a 1gb stick of ram for $20. The ram made a world of difference in computer speed and loading time in games, but I kept getting errors and sometimes the computer would just reboot for no reason, so I took it out. Don't feel like buying another stick as it may be bad as well. I guess I'm just stuck with the 512mb that I have until I buy a new computer
 
duster_do_little said:
It's just a Bestec

I don't really wanna put more money into this computer though, I was just hoping it would hold me off until I built up enough cash to build one, or just buy a decent Asus all in one. About a month ago I bought the video card for $30 (didn't really make a noticeable difference vs the onboard video car) and I bought a 1gb stick of ram for $20. The ram made a world of difference in computer speed and loading time in games, but I kept getting errors and sometimes the computer would just reboot for no reason, so I took it out. Don't feel like buying another stick as it may be bad as well. I guess I'm just stuck with the 512mb that I have until I buy a new computer
Click to expand...

Why don't you just exchange the RAM for a working one?
 
The cost to ship it back and have it restocked was close to the amount I already paid for the ram. IMO, with nonworking products, the manufacture should be paying newegg for the shipping if it's returned. Ratings were pretty high on the ram, but after looking into it, there were a butt load of them and a lot of them stated that they had to send back multiple times to get a working one.
 
bump

Any other help on this. I'm still having problems with it. I have it set as the slave, I have it set to auto detect DMA and it's on an 80 pin IDE cable (grey end) Whenever I watch a movie from it, the audio will slur, whenever I transfer something to it, it will transfer at the normal rate, but the whole computer will start lagging
 
I figured out the problem. The drive was reverted to PIO mode when I plugged it in. I uninstalled the drivers for that IDE cable and the drive worked great and was in ultra dma 5. Then a few days later, it automatically went back to PIO mode. I know a bad drive can cause this, but is it possible that my mobo has a problem or something, because the drive was reverted to PIO mode as soon as I plugged it in the first time, even though it was set to DMA if possible.

I know ram isn't the cause as I don't have the ram in because it's bad. With just the 1gb stick of ram in my computer, it won't even reboot all the way without shutting off and turning back on. With both init will just have errors every once in awhile. If I'm playing a game, it will run a lot faster (load times will be like cut in half and my frames per second will be a lot higher. Then all of a sudden I get an error and the game exits. Without the stick in, I don't get any errors.
 
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