Azhura

Pentium 4 3.20 ghz

I was told by a member of this forum that having 2 harddrives on separate data cables from improve my gaming performance. I recently found out that I have two IDE cables, an 80 and a 40. Each cable has two ends. I have the 40 plugged into a my DvD-ROM drives, and my 80 goes to my harddrive.

I have room for a SATA but no money to buy a SATA drive. I have a 100 gig harddrive that I could use as a gaming drive but that would mean I would have to disconnect my DvD drives and put the gaming drive on the 40. Either that, or put my OS on the 40 and the gaming drive on the 80, with again, no DVD drives.

I could also put both harddrives on the same data cable, but ran into problems doing that and I fear that I won't get a performance boost if I'm putting them on the same data cable.

I've thought about finding an IDE to SATA converter and using my 100 gig seagate converted to a SATA in the SATA slot as my gaming drive.

Any tips on more possible options?

Thanks

Tumbleweed36

First of all, you don't want to put any hard drive on a 40 connector cable. Second, if this were my rig, I would put both the hard drives on the Primary master with one as the master and one as the slave.

If you decide (IMHO, you may find a very small performance gain by having separate channels for hard drives (dedicated gaming hard drive), but I don't think you will find a great performance boost) to put a hard drive on the Secondary IDE connector alone. Just make sure that each hard drive is on an 80 connector cable.

One additional thought, is that if you wish to have separate IDE connectors for other optional drives, then purchase a separate PCI card as an IDE add-on so you can separate the items as you wish.