basic drive letter assignment

[Bozette]

I've been away from computers for several years and have gotten very rusty. I'm trying to remember about setting up hard drives and dvd drives.
When you have 2 hard drives and one dvd drive, what's the best setup as far as primary and secondary? One hard drive would be the boot drive (C drive of course but does it matter if the dvd or 2nd hard drive is the D drive?
Does using SSD drives have any bearing?
Thanks in advance
Boze

 

[DrB0b]

There is a LOT of possible setups with just the small amount of information you have provided. Realistically as long as you have your main "boot" drive as C: you should be fine regardless of what else is D or E. The only caveat to this is if you are still using PATA drives, and really drive letters doesnt matter but physical placement does. File transfer between the two PATA drives will be quicker if they are on separate IDE cables as opposed to daisy chaining them on the same PATA. SATA will not have a specific order like PATA. SSD for all intents and purposes will function similar to SATA in that instance.

If I was in you shoes, I would set up a RAID 1, if the board allows or you have a controller, that way you have some redundancy if a drive fails. You could also go with C: being the OS drive and D: or E: being data, but you are still SOL if either fail. Also, could go C: and D: on one drive, via two partitions, and have C be OS and D be data and mirror to your other hard drive.

Just some things to think about!

"You don't know what you got, till its gone..
80's hair band Cinderella or ode to data backups???

 

[Bozette]

Thanks DrBob,

It just seemed back in the dusty corners of my mind there was a 'better' way for performance or some other reason. Glad to hear it's not a vital issue. Maybe more of a personal preference with some logic thrown in.

Thanks again

 

[DrB0b]

If there is something else to consider, I'm not remembering off the top of my head. Outside of the speed issue when daisying two drives or a drive and optical, that's all I can remember. But yea, alot of personal preference on the initial setup.

With all the brilliant minds here, if we did forget something, they should be quick to point it out after reading where we are at.

"You don't know what you got, till its gone..
80's hair band Cinderella or ode to data backups???

 

[BadBigBen]

With PATA, I agree, that with PATA it did matter, C: drive (or better said the one that was to be C) should be on the Primary Channel and set as Master, and DVD on the Secondary channel and set as Master or Slave (if another drive is in the system). XP used to not like it, on some systems, if the DVD drive was on the Primary channel and would go bonkers at times...

now to the Master/Slave/CS setting, obviously the master drive should sit on the end of the EIDE cable and any slave drive in the middle, specially so when cable select is used (though I would tell you not to use such a setting, troubleshooting can be an issue)...

with SATA it no longer matters where the drives and what order they are attached, as each is on it's own channel...





Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
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