New hard drive

[BA93]

I just purchased a new 120 GB hard drive for my home PC, and I was hoping I could get some advice.

My current hard drive is 20 GB, and I'm ok with leaving it the master drive and turn the new one into a slave. I want to format the new hard drive as NTFS.

My questions are as follows:

1. Anything wrong with having the smaller hard drive be the master?
2. Does XP give me the option to format the drive as NTFS when it detects the new drive?
3. Should I partition the new drive or leave it as one large partition?
4. Anything else I should know or consider because even though I'm relatively proficient with PCs, I've never installed a hard drive before.

thanks.

 

[hellbunny]

For best performance the fastest drive should be the primary (C) drive. I've heard they should also be on different IDE channels/cables. Jumper the bastard correctly or be prepared to unscrew/undo everything. You will be able to format as NTFS. I'm not sure if there is any reason to not make it one partition with NTFS (there were several under FAT16/FAT32).

 

[Ags_EE]

For install, just follow the sheet included with the hard drive and remember to jumper. They're usually fairly detailed now and most people should be able to figure it out and get it done in half an hour, max.

There's no real problem in leaving your smaller hard drive as the boot drive, except for speed reasons. Usually, with all the crap that I accumulate, I keep a small drive as boot, so that in case my Windows install commits suicide, or I get some nasty virus, I can just reformat the main drive and not really have to worry about losing my media stuff. All your programs should comfortably fit on that 20 gigs, unless you install lots of huge programs, games usually, on it.

 

[MrPhlegm]

There is ususally no reason to keep all of the programs on the smaller drive.

I keep a small drive as boot and install most of my programs on the bigger faster drive.

 

[Ags_EE]

Well, the only reason to keep programs on the main drive is so that you don't have to worry about manually deleting them if you do a format on the main drive, since the programs are not going to work without their registry keys. Might as well be able to get rid of everything in one try.

 

[ArrogantAssclown]

I set my daughters computer up like that. Operating system on old drive and programs on the new drive. The only problem that I had was a lot of programs (most childrens computer games) did not want to run unless on the "root" directory. Must be some type of anti-copy software. I finally gave up and removed the old drive (6 years old) and installed windows on the new one. It was giving more problems than a 3 gig hard drive was worth!

 

[7Titles]

USB/Ethernet drives are nice to get. I have roughly 600 cd's worth of music on mine. Its portable so I can take it to my buddies computer and save music etc. Programs run just fine off of it but I wouldnt use it to play games from. I dont really care how fast MS Word loads eh! I think its a 120 gig for about 150 bucks or so.

 

[BA93]

Installation was no problem, except I had to buy a longer ribbon cable to reach where I wanted to place the second hard drive. Thanks for the advice.