Instead of purchasing a new computer to get increased access speed and storage space, you might consider adding another hard drive. There are several reasons for installing an additional drive:
- Install a second operating system
- Provide additional storage space
- Provide a faster hard drive
- Hold the system swap file
- Back up the original hard drive
- Increase fault tolerance
When two PATA hard drives are connected to the same data cable, one drive must be jumpered as the master drive, and the other drive must be jumpered as the slave drive. This allows the computer to communicate with both drives individually. As shown in Figure 1, jumper pins are located on the back of the hard drive and can configure a hard drive to be a standalone drive, a master drive, or a slave drive. Some drives can be jumpered to Cable Select (CS). The CS setting allows the BIOS to automatically configure the master and slave drives according to the order they are attached to the cable. Refer to the hard drive diagram or manual for the correct jumper settings.
Each SATA hard drive has its own data cable; therefore, there is no master-slave relationship between drives.
A Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) installation can provide data protection or increased performance when connecting multiple hard drives, as shown in Figure 2. RAID requires two or more hard drives. You can install RAID using hardware or software. Hardware installations are usually more dependable but more expensive. In a hardware implementation, a dedicated processor on a RAID adapter card or the motherboard makes the calculations needed to perform the special storage functions across multiple disks. Software installations are created and managed by some operating systems. It is important to understand the cost, performance, and reliability of each RAID array configuration.
After selecting the appropriate hard drive for the computer, follow these general guidelines during installation:
Step 1. Place the hard drive in an empty drive bay, and tighten the screws to secure the hard drive.
Step 2. Configure a PATA hard drive as either master, slave, or auto-detect. If you have a SCSI hard drive, set the ID number and terminate the SCSI chain.
Step 3. Attach the power cable and the data cable to the hard drive. Ensure that pin 1 of the PATA data cable is properly aligned.