another 3rd hard drive question

[scott]

To answer your last question first - I run a 1 Ghz dell machine with 512 memory. It keep up with all GBPVR functions, both direct out it's very basic video card to a monitor, and through network to MVP. I only have one tuner but can easily record and play stored video with no glitches.

In terms of how to set up my three drives. All three - including the 40 gig system drive- are modern - 7200 rpm - with cache's ranging form 8 to 16 MB.

Would it be better to but my two large data harddrives on the same IDE cable and let the system drive share the cable with the DVD burner? I'm thinking the OS and programming files would mainly be stored in memory, and the video drives would be the ones needing the higher IDE speed.

Also - Are the two IDE ports on motherboard ports equal? Ted mentions bus 0 must be used for the system (boot) drive - is that one of the two IDE ports - assumingly the one already plugged into my drives?

[Ted the Penguin]

I would suggest adding your new drive to the currently open connection :p, no seriously
ok what you are talking about is load balancing, and I am not sure that you will see much of a performance difference, but it is best to have the drives that are used the most on separate busses. now I am assuming that you got the computer with the system drive in the primary (bus 0) master (end of cable) position, and the cd drive in the secondary master position. then you added your first big drive to the primary slave position (same bus as the other HDD, on the middle connector). so do the same with your second new drive, put it in the secondary slave position (same bus as CD drive, middle connector).

ok now a little background about drives. so what I was talking about with bus 0 drive 0, some old motherboards would only look for a bootable hard drive in the primary master position, this is a separate issue from old operating systems needing to be before a certain cylinder.
now load balancing, ideally you should have a dedicated bus for each drive to achive maximum performance, performance is reduced when two disks are on the same bus because they must use the same ribbon to transport their data, and I believe that they must wait for eachother to finish before using the bus, meaning under full load performance is cut in half. for your application I suggest putting the drives that you use most on separate busses

EDIT: rereading the question that was probably too much. but um, they should perform equally

[scott]

excellent - I think I'm good now. Thanks

[Ted the Penguin]

no problem, sorry I can get a little verbose when talking about hardware

[scott]

just wanted to report:

ide 1: boot hard disk, large harddrive one
ide 2: DVD burner, large hard drive two

System is recognizing all three harddrives, and all appears fine. I successfully transferred 160 gigs of recoridngs from origional large drive on IDE 1 to the ide 2 based harddrive... Thanks for you help guys!

Can't comment on speed yet.

I haven't successfully "spanned" both large drives togethers with a single drive letter as GBPVR requires, but I'm still playing. The origional large drive won't let me make it dynamic, which I think is a requirement of a spanned drive. Even after deleting partition and reforming, I don't have a right-click dynamic or span option like I did when installing the new large HD #2. I'm going to pull drive, reboot, and reinstall it - than maybe the OS will treat it differently.

[HtV]

Did you format drive 2 (the new one) as NTFS afaik know that's required.

Edit: sorry didn't read well, I meant the old HD (well the new one too).

[Ted the Penguin]

you shouldnt have to do any formating, since I can right click on the disk icon (not the partitions, the disk over on the left, probably says disk 1, basic, size, online) and it gives me the option to convert to dynamic disk. this is with all of my partitions in tact (since I only have 1 drive at work).
let us know

[HtV]

@ Ted: yes you were right. I kind of assumed that ntfs would be necessary:o . For anyone interested, this page explains it quite well I think: http://www.petri.co.il/difference_betwee...0_2003.htm

[scott]

opps - I think I was right clicking on the partition, not the left-hand panel.

If you're right, I need to look for my big red - "That Was Easy" button! Thanks!