Should I get a second HD for this?

[Jeepers79]

I have a DVD burner on my new system, and I want to do a lot of burning of old home videos onto DVD. Think it would be worth my while to get a second HD (set as a slave) to dump my videos on before they get sent to DVD? I have a 180 gig drive now, but thought it may be better to have a drive that i'd use just for the video stuff?
Worth the $$ or nah?

Mike

 

[tristan]

Well 180 is HUGE. To be completely honest, what I would do is get a 36.7gig 10,000rpm harddrive and make that your system disk. Containing windows and your vital applications. This will make windows run faster and the 180 can be your slave for all of your storage. What do you think? Does your board support sata?

 

[Jeepers79]

Thats a good idea...
Sata, not to sound dumb....but im learning here Whats that?

Would there be an "easy" way to just transfer the OS portion to a new drive....or I got to start from scratch?

 

[tristan]

Well you can just keep the data on the 180 and get the new hd. Once that comes make the new HD the primary and install windows on it and make the 180 the slave. You can then pull the things you need from your old drive to the new and then whipe the 180 clean.

Post what motherboard you have and I can tell you if you even need to worry about sata. Sata is just a type harddrive that uses a different smaller cord and has faster transfer rates, but your board has to support it.

 

[Praetor]

Sata is just a type harddrive that uses a different smaller cord and has faster transfer rates, but your board has to support it.

Yep! Although realistically the benifits of SATA only kick in if you're doing mass file transfers around ... anything else and you're looking at a 2-5second improvement If you're burning DVDs (and you're looking to do a good job), you wont wanna be burning fast regardless and even if you did, ATA66 would be more than good enough to keep up.

Having that faster boot drive does indeed help overall but to answer your questions, yeah, having a dedicated drive for DVD content is a very good idea: the bigger the better .... you'll run out of space faster than you think

 

[tristan]

Yeah especially with movies, those things are huge

 

[kb1ghc]

alot of SATA drives also support IDE

 

[maymaythar]

If u mother board doesnt come with SATA, you can buy a PCI extension of SATA. I think not expensive about US$20.

SATA can support only two drives. Not sure if you install two SATA PCI card can handle 4 drives or not.

 

[Praetor]

Yeah especially with movies, those things are huge

Yep! 5-12GB a pop!

alot of SATA drives also support IDE

You mean a lot of SATA board support IDE? In either case, a minor technicality (but the distinction is somewhat important): SATA is a part of the IDE specification... you cannot have SATA without IDE (not neccesarily the other way around however).

Now if you mean those SATA-PATA convertors, those things work (technically) but are kinda flakey

SATA can support only two drives. Not sure if you install two SATA PCI card can handle 4 drives or not./quote]
The controllers can support one device apeice (correct me if im wrong), most controller cards come with two controllers .... the SATA interface theoretically can support 26 devices