What is the best thing to do with 2 hdd

[jhayarviray]

Hi experts i heard its possible to use more than one hard disk in 1 computer,a friend of mine gave me his hard disk. i want to both put my 80Gb hard disk and the one who gave my friend to me in one computer but i dont know how to.
And is it true that 2 hdd are good, and can make your computer work nicely.

 

[SNGX1275]

Yes, you can use 2. I'm going to assume the drives are IDE rather than SATA. You should power down the computer and pull both drives out, remembering which was the one were using. Set the jumper on the back of it to Master (it may already be there). Then take the drive your friend gave you and set its jumper to Slave.

Once you have that done, put the drives back in your machine, and connect the IDE cable to both. Power up and you are probably set.

Complications can arise if the drive you were given wasn't partitioned/formatted. But you can fix that through Disk Management.

If the drives are SATA, there are no jumpers you need to worry about, just connect the drive.

To get any performance benefit you'll want to set your pagefile/swap to the 2nd drive, that keeps Windows and the pagefile from needing to access the same drive at the same time.

 

[jhayarviray]

what is sata and IDE sorry but im not too familiar with that

whats the difference between the two IDE and SATA

 

[zipperman]

A second HD is a good way to save things,like pictures and backup things like
Favorites.
Then You won't lose any files when reinstalling Windows.If you have to ask,you probably have IDE and can have up to 4 HD's.
Read the Motherboard manual for how to do this.

 

[SNGX1275]

SATA and IDE (PATA) are just the drive interface type. IDE uses the big wide ribbons 40 or 80 wire, and SATA uses a much less wide and smaller cable. Google will help you a lot more than anyone will want to on the forums for such a basic question.