On 27 Jan 2002 at 4:11, Kenneth Alan Boyd Ramsay wrote: >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?
I've been using a pair of 9GB SCSI 5.25" full-height drives [ST410800N] in my home computer for a while now, I ust agree that cooling is tremendously important. When I had them crammed into the mini-tower that the motherboard, etc, are in, they would very quickly get too hot to touch the frames, even with the case cover off. I've moved them into their own separate mini-tower, to which I've added a couple of fans. Not pretty, but it keeps the drives operating somewhat closer to Seagate's recommended temperature range. Also, when I first set up the drives, I did have some problems with spin-up times being fairly long for the drives. (That much spinning metal takes a while to get up to speed.) So, I had to set my SCSI controller to wait for several seconds before attempting to initialize/detect the drives. You may need to do something similar. I'm currently using the drives for Win95 and DOS. One is the primary start-up drive; the other is for backups. Backups are as simple as copy-and-paste to the second drive, though I have been experimenting with using Symantec's "Ghost" software for backups. Either way, it effectively is a drive mirroring scheme (RAID 1), but done manually. A number of manufacturers make SCSI RAID controllers which can be used to put two or more drives into an array, and be treated (by the OS) as one larger disk. "RAID 0" is what you'd be looking for, as that allows multiple drives to be joined together, but doesn't sacrifice any space for error correction. [Backups are a _must!_] However, hardware SCSI RAID comes at a price - US$100 to $500, depending on the controller. Hope this helps, and I'll be happy to answer any further questions. Sincerely, Anthony J. Albert =========================================================== Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED] Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle "Ta'Lon, is that you?" "It's me most days, except for those days when I don't feel quite like myself and I suppose that I am someone else, but for now, yes, it is me." -G'Kar and Ta'Lon, Babylon 5 episode: _The_Ragged_Edge_ 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
