Its unfortunately a little more complicated than that, Larry. An IDE
or ATA 66/100 controller can indeed be connected to two hard drives --
a master and a slave -- with an appropriate cable. However, each
drive can be jumpered as "always master", "always slave", or "cable
select"; the later means that each drive is set to master or slave by
the cable connectors. To keep things interesting, not all IDE cables
are wired to perform "cable select".
The penalty for an incorrect IDE configuration is system that won't
boot Windows. I've not yet managed to lose data, but I would never
play this game without first making and verifying backups for all of
the data on the all of the drives involved.
If you're building or buying a new computer, consider Serial ATA
(SATA) drives; their data is moved serially, so the cables are
narrower and thus block less airflow, and they are point-to-point
rather than daisy-chained like IDE. In general, you can purchase
larger and faster drives with SATA interfaces, but they also cost
more.
73,
Dave, AA6YQ
--- In [email protected], "larry allen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> A computer, intelligent, friend of mine has been educating me of
swapping
> hard drives... For example, drive C..is usually marked at 'master'
and the
> others are marked as slaves....
> The marking is a jumper ..
> On the bank of your hard drive are three recepticles...
> The first one is a long plug, of which the data flows...
> The second plug / receptical contain 4 rather heavy wires.. marked
yellow,
> black, black and red.. they contain the D.C. wiring.. I assume by
the
> colours....
> The third plug has no opposite polarity receptical but contains
> jumper(s)... This is the jumper which determnes whether or not the
hard
> drive is a slave or master drive...
> On one side of your hard drive, you should notice some printing
which
> tells you how to make the drive a master or slave...
> You follow the instructions to make that drive a master or slave....
> This will allow you to put another drive onto your existing
computer....
> including removing them should you desire....
> I had three computers.. I took the oldest computer's hard drive out
and
> put them into my newer computer... making the older computer's
drive C my
> newer computer's drive D, or which ever letter was available....
> Now I do realise I have probably drifted somewhat off topic but I
hope the
> information was of some value...
>
> Larry ve3fxq
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "jhaynesatalumni" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 12:33 PM
> Subject: [digitalradio] Re: External hard drives?
>
>
> Isn't somebody selling a thumb drive that is all configured so
> everything runs out of it and doesn't touch the computer hard
> drive? Seems like I was reading about a product like this that
> was to make it safe to use a public computer for your private
> work.
>
