Will Adding a Second Hard Drive Slow my System?

I posted a message a few days ago about adding a second hard
drive---if I could add an Ultra ATA hard drive to my system that
currently has a SATA hard drive. I was told this would be no problem.

I now have in my machine:

120GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200RPM)

I have purchased:

Seagate Barracuda 120GB Ultra ATA (7200 RPM) ($50 after
rebates-unopened box)

I do have a free IDE slot on my motherboard. It is a Dell, so I looked
in the support forums to see if there are any issues with installing a
second drive. Several people posted that installing this slower drive
could slow down my main hard drive. Is there any truth to this?

I don't want to slow my system, because I play games like Doom 3 and
Half-Life 2. I want to keep my programs and games on my main SATA
drive and use the new Ultra ATA drive only for capturing footage from
my DV camera. I haven't opened the box yet, so I wanted to check here
first. Reading posts here has helped me a lot in the past.

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Chad

On 25 Nov 2004 20:11:26 -0800,
(ChadDiesel) wrote:

I posted a message a few days ago about adding a second hard
drive---if I could add an Ultra ATA hard drive to my system that
currently has a SATA hard drive. I was told this would be no problem.

I now have in my machine:

120GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200RPM)

I have purchased:

Seagate Barracuda 120GB Ultra ATA (7200 RPM) ($50 after
rebates-unopened box)

I do have a free IDE slot on my motherboard. It is a Dell, so I looked
in the support forums to see if there are any issues with installing a
second drive. Several people posted that installing this slower drive
could slow down my main hard drive. Is there any truth to this?

No, not in any way.


I don't want to slow my system, because I play games like Doom 3 and
Half-Life 2.

Hard drives have nothing to do with gaming performance
except loading of new levels... unless your box doesn't have
enough memory in which case you should add more. Task
Manager will show peak memory utilization. Regardless, no
it won't hurt, and if you dedicated a fixed-size first
partition on the new drive to game installations it'll
probably speed up game level load times.



I want to keep my programs and games on my main SATA
drive and use the new Ultra ATA drive only for capturing footage from
my DV camera.

You are aware that editing is faster when at least 2 drives
are used? I dont' mean RAIDed, rather a source and
destination for the editing work. Capturing to one drive
then saving to the other while editing, and back again for
multi-pass editing.

I haven't opened the box yet, so I wanted to check here
first. Reading posts here has helped me a lot in the past.

Depending on how old your SATA drive is, the new one might
even be faster.... probably nearly the same though.

It shoudn't make a difference if you have one SATA and one ATA drive
There's a very noticeable difference in game performance between 7200 rpm
drives and 5400rpm drives. Don't make a mistake and get anything lower than
7200 rpm. The amount of cache(2mb vs. 8mb) makes a small diiference too.

I posted a message a few days ago about adding a second hard
drive---if I could add an Ultra ATA hard drive to my system that
currently has a SATA hard drive. I was told this would be no problem.

Several people posted that installing this slower drive
could slow down my main hard drive. Is there any truth to this?

Hard drives have nothing to do with gaming performance
except loading of new levels... unless your box doesn't have
enough memory in which case you should add more.