Computer question

[cougarfreak]

How do you know if your computer can run a 2nd hard drive? And if not, is an external drive alot slower? When i run a scan on a website, it says my computer is an Asus p4s533-e. I had it custom built by a local shop.

[Airhog]

Nearly all IBM pc compatible computers can run 4 IDE Drives. So if you have a cd-rom and one hard drive, you can run 2 more Hard Drives no problem.

[DaddyTorgo]

and it's easy as pie to do couger. someone here (myself or someone else) can walk you through it once you buy a new one. don't don't don't pay someone to do it, unless it's an insignificant amount of money (to you) to do that.

[MizzouRah]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

How do you know if your computer can run a 2nd hard drive? And if not, is an external drive alot slower? When i run a scan on a website, it says my computer is an Asus p4s533-e. I had it custom built by a local shop.

You should be fine. You probably have two IDE slots on your motherboard. One usually goes to your HD, the other one to your CD rom. You should have an extra plug on your cable to your current HD that can go into another drive, it just has to be the 2nd drive in the chain and both should be set to cable select. That is the preferred method, although you can also make the first HD the master and the 2nd one the slave, but that's in older pc's and your's should be fine.

Plug you 2nd HD into the open slot in the cable connected to your current HD. By default, most new drives come jumpered as cable select.

External drives are just as fast as hooking one up enternally, as long as you have a USB port that is at 2.0 - meaning able to accept high speed data transfers. If so, buying an external drive in an enclosure would be the easiest method. You just plug the cable into your USB port and BOOM! You're ready to use it, plus you can take it with you if you need to move the data to another pc.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

and it's easy as pie to do couger. someone here (myself or someone else) can walk you through it once you buy a new one. don't don't don't pay someone to do it, unless it's an insignificant amount of money (to you) to do that.

I just may buy one and have you guys walk me through it. Me and my wife are expecting our first child in 7 months, and I'm sure I'm gonna need the extra space for digital pictures.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by MizzouRah

External drives are just as fast as hooking one up enternally, as long as you have a USB port that is at 2.0 - meaning able to accept high speed data transfers. If so, buying an external drive in an enclosure would be the easiest method. You just plug the cable into your USB port and BOOM! You're ready to use it, plus you can take it with you if you need to move the data to another pc.

How do you know if your USB ports are 2.0? I had windows 98 originally and upgraded to XP after I had the computer built. I remember the guy saying that 98 would run a fewer amount of USB ports, but I've upgraded.

[MizzouRah]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

How do you know if your USB ports are 2.0? I had windows 98 originally and upgraded to XP after I had the computer built. I remember the guy saying that 98 would run a fewer amount of USB ports, but I've upgraded.

Right click on my computer, properties, hardware, device manager. Go down to USB controllers and if it's 2.0, you should see something in that list (after you click the plus sign) that says 2.0. Mine says, "USB enhanced 2.0 controller".

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by MizzouRah

Right click on my computer, properties, hardware, device manager. Go down to USB controllers and if it's 2.0, you should see something in that list (after you click the plus sign) that says 2.0. Mine says, "USB enhanced 2.0 controller".

Mine doesn't say enhanced 2.0 controller. I've got 6 listings, 3 of which are "used" and they say.......Sis7001 PCI to USB open host controller. The other 3 say USB root hub. Maybe I don't have it.

[cougarfreak]

I just checked Best Buy and they had this model:

Seagate 120GB Internal Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive
Model: ST3120026A-RK

for $94.99, plus you get $60 in rebates, so final cost is 34.99. That's pretty damn cheap. I've only got a 40 gig drive now. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

I just checked Best Buy and they had this model:

Seagate 120GB Internal Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive
Model: ST3120026A-RK

for $94.99, plus you get $60 in rebates, so final cost is 34.99. That's pretty damn cheap. I've only got a 40 gig drive now. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

do it do it do it!!

[Easy Mac]

You can get this 200 gb drive for $70. It cost me like $85 last week. Simple install and setup.

http://shop1.outpost.com/product/349...H:MAIN_RSLT_PG

[MizzouRah]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

Mine doesn't say enhanced 2.0 controller. I've got 6 listings, 3 of which are "used" and they say.......Sis7001 PCI to USB open host controller. The other 3 say USB root hub. Maybe I don't have it.

You could check your motherboard's website or hook a friend's external drive into your USB slot. XP will tell you if it's not 2.0 compatible. I'm thinking yours isn't.

Anyhow the other method should work just fine and well, looks like it'll be cheaper as well. Good luck!

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

do it do it do it!!

Bought it today.........I'm debating on installing tonight, or I've got a kid in class that's a computer whiz, I might just have him install it at school tomorrow.

[cougarfreak]

And, just for the hell of it, I just ordered another 512mb of ram to up me to a gig. Got everything for under $100, hard drive and memory.

[PackerFanatic]

Nice man. Yeah, installing that stuff is damn easy and you will be happy with the results.

[cougarfreak]

Ok, after reading the instructions, I'm gonna give it a shot. If I'm not back on the board tonight, just know that there is some guy in KY out there screaming obscentities at his computer because he's an idiot.

[cougarfreak]

I'm back, it's working ok. I plugged in the cord off the material thing upside down at first so nothing worked. I flipped it around and it's working fine now, and my computer recognized it. My only question is........it's a 120 gb hard drive. When I rt. click on it, it says 111 gb free, but nothing is on it. Is that normal?

[DaddyTorgo]

totally normal

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

totally normal

Ok, no problem. But where in the hell's the other 9gb?

[cartman]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

Ok, no problem. But where in the hell's the other 9gb?

Usually they are bad spots on the disk that are marked as unusable. Normally about 5-10% of a drive's stated capacity is unusable.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by cartman

Usually they are bad spots on the disk that are marked as unusable. Normally about 5-10% of a drive's stated capacity is unusable.

Ok thanks. That's kind of nuts. But anyways......this drive's speed is 7200 rpm, I'm not sure what my original drive's speed is. Can I check that? And if it is slower, would it make a huge difference to make the new one my master drive in terms of performance?

[cartman]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

Ok thanks. That's kind of nuts. But anyways......this drive's speed is 7200 rpm, I'm not sure what my original drive's speed is. Can I check that? And if it is slower, would it make a huge difference to make the new one my master drive in terms of performance?

It might, but it is a royal PITA to make a new drive the master. There are free tools you can download that can give you all of the info on your drives.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by cartman

It might, but it is a royal PITA to make a new drive the master. There are free tools you can download that can give you all of the info on your drives.

Ok, thanks guys for all the help. I'd have never tried it w/o knowing I had help if I had needed it.

[Airhog]

you will see some difference if you go from a 5400 to a 7200 drive. Especially if you play games. Another way to increase your performance with two drives is to move your windows swap file to your faster drive. Windows will be more responsive if your swap file is on a different drive from your installation...

[Daimyo]

Originally Posted by cartman

Usually they are bad spots on the disk that are marked as unusable. Normally about 5-10% of a drive's stated capacity is unusable.

That's not true. This is purely a marketing thing. Consumer hard drive manufacturers market there drives in decimal so 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Windows counts drives the traditional way, in binary, so 1 GB = 1,073,741,824. If you take the 200,000,000,000 bytes and divide by 1,073,741,824 bytes per GB you get the 111.8 GB windows reports.

[Daimyo]

One easy thing you can do to improve performance is to move your pagefile to the new disk so its on a seperate disk from your OS.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by Daimyo

One easy thing you can do to improve performance is to move your pagefile to the new disk so its on a seperate disk from your OS.

What in God's name is that?

[PilotMan]

Hey, if you have any problem with this let me know. You know that I live like 10 blocks away. I just got done upgrading my son's old system with 2 10gig drives in place of the 1 1.4 gig drives that he had on it. And I had to replace my old 2 10 gig drives this spring with a 160gig drive.

Not a problem if you need help, except that I am going back to work tomarrow. Too bad, I have been home for almost 2 weeks straight. One thing that I might add would be to set the partitions up for it. I had considered not doing it, and it paid off in dividends when I had to reinstall windows. Now I know that it is merely a slave drive, but it might be benificial before you fill it up with everything that you always wanted.

Do you have a DVD Burner? It is going to make storing your pics that much easier and you won't have to worry about losing them when your HD crashes. I just picked one up from Micro Center in Sharonville for about $45. An OEM version with all the bells and whistles. I can't believe that I went this long without one.

Anyway, let me know. PM me, email me, or catch me on AIM.

PM

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by PilotMan

Hey, if you have any problem with this let me know. You know that I live like 10 blocks away. I just got done upgrading my son's old system with 2 10gig drives in place of the 1 1.4 gig drives that he had on it. And I had to replace my old 2 10 gig drives this spring with a 160gig drive.

Not a problem if you need help, except that I am going back to work tomarrow. Too bad, I have been home for almost 2 weeks straight. One thing that I might add would be to set the partitions up for it. I had considered not doing it, and it paid off in dividends when I had to reinstall windows. Now I know that it is merely a slave drive, but it might be benificial before you fill it up with everything that you always wanted.

Do you have a DVD Burner? It is going to make storing your pics that much easier and you won't have to worry about losing them when your HD crashes. I just picked one up from Micro Center in Sharonville for about $45. An OEM version with all the bells and whistles. I can't believe that I went this long without one.

Anyway, let me know. PM me, email me, or catch me on AIM.

PM

Cool, thanks. No dvd burner yet, but I may pick one up. Where can i find Pagefile, and do I just copy and past?

[Daimyo]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

What in God's name is that?

Right click on my computer and click properties
Click the advanced tab
In the performance pane, click the Settings button
Click the advanced tab
In the Virtual memory pane, click the Change button

You should see all your drives listed here with some amount of disk space listed. I'd reccomend you click your old drive and then slect "No paging file" and then click your new drive and and select "Custom size" and fill in 4095 for the min and max (alternatively you could just do "System managed size."

Windows generally needs more memory to run applications than you have physical memory. To handle this issue it creates a temporary file on disk called virtual memory or a pagefile that it can use as temporary space to swap stuff out of physical memory. Because of this it can present up to 4GB of memory to programs even though you only have 1GB of actual memory. This can happen a lot (although not so much if you have 1GB now) so its good to put it on a faster disk... also the disk your OS is on already gets a lot of action and moving to a different disk speeds things up considerably since it can access both disks in parallel.

[chinaski]

Originally Posted by cougarfreak

What in God's name is that?

http://www.theeldergeek.com/paging_file.htm

in short, its works somewhat like RAM, but instead of actual physical memory - its a "memory file" on your hard drive. Ideally, its best to have your page file (aka swap file) on a seperate drive from your OS. Its not _that_ big of deal, but if you wanted to tweak your performance - move your page file from your C to your new hard drive. The eldergeek.com page should tell you how to move it, its very simple.

[chinaski]

dola,

Daimyo is on point!

[cougarfreak]

Is 4095 ok even if the old setting is 768? I've got 512mb of ram now, the other 512 isn't here yet.

[Daimyo]

The only drawback to putting a bigger number is that it takes up more disk space. I'd set it at least to 2048, but its hard to know what is the most efficient setting without knowing exactly how you use the computer, etc. If you set it to "System managed size" it will change the size as needed so its pretty safe, but not as efficient as just making it larger then you need.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by Daimyo

The only drawback to putting a bigger number is that it takes up more disk space. I'd set it at least to 2048, but its hard to know what is the most efficient setting without knowing exactly how you use the computer, etc. If you set it to "System managed size" it will change the size as needed so its pretty safe, but not as efficient as just making it larger then you need.

Thanks man, I appreciate the help. I had no idea on this stuff.

[cougarfreak]

And I installed the other 512mb of ram tonight. Easy stuff, the last time I bought some I watched the installer install it, so I had a pretty good idea of how to do it. Now, how easy is a graphics card? Mine's ancient.

[DaddyTorgo]

graphics cards are basically the same thing. unscrew old one from motherboard slot. screw new one in.

[cougarfreak]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

graphics cards are basically the same thing. unscrew old one from motherboard slot. screw new one in.

Oh man, I just might end up going nuts upgrading my computer.

[PilotMan]

Now your addicted. Welcome to the club. Please pay your club dues to my paypal account. Thank You.

[PilotMan]

dola

Just wait until you blow your first motherboard because of some stupid static electricity.

[cougarfreak]

I'm thinking about this ATI Tv wonder thing. Gotta do all this shit before the baby arrives in April.

[Daimyo]

For the graphic card you need to figure out if your computer has an AGP or PCI-X port or if you're stuck with plain old PCI. After that its easy (you may also need to make sure your power supply has the right power connector if you get a good enough card).

[cougarfreak]

and I go further.........new dvd burner installed today.