On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, JJG wrote: > Yes, I though about it some more and figured this would be the case. I do > have another one of those old full height monsta brick 8gig hd lying around. > > Is it possible to install both hard drives in the machine and configure them > to look as one big 16 gig drive?
Yes. See SUBST/? or APPEND/? in DOS. But I think most who have tried it would NOT recommend it. (To be fair, I never tried it, but I have read reports of it making crash recovery much more difficult.) Given search times for large directories, it makes sense to organise things so that you have Rock-n-roll on one drive and Classics on the other. For more efficient use of the drives, you might even consider partitioning them, to reduce the cluster size. If your average MP3 is small relative to the size of a few clusters, you are wasting the unused space at the end of the last cluster - a relatively minor problem. Keep it simple. Check that your power supply is strong enough to spin up all the drives at once (even if you can spin up sequentially). Make sure that you have good cooling around each drive. How about a seldom-used floppy between the hard drives? > PS feel free to recommend any other solutions you can think of. SCSI is good for multiple drives. If you use Linux, you can even do software RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives). I have read that Promise make RAID hardware controller cards. If you stripe the drives (half the bits of each file on each drive), you may nearly double the effective speed. No redundancy - all-your-eggs-in-one-basket - so back it up. At the other end of the RAID spectrum is mirroring - both drives the same - 100% redundant - half the capacity - each drive backs up the other - perfect backup (unless your system is stolen/destroyed. :-( ) Boyd Ramsay [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
