duel hardrives

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blitz n fire

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I recently finished building a new computer and was looking around through my old comp and got interested in using my old hardrive to do a duel kind of thing. Is there a way I could use my current hardive already installed with Vista to run mainly the OS and use my old one for file storage or to hold games/music, etc? Also, would it work like a second C drive and both could work together at the same time in harmony? Another concern was my old hardrive has xp running on it and a lot of other old stuff built up after 2 years od use, how would that affect everything? Little confused, I hope somebody can shed a little light on my issues or throw in andy other imput that would be usefull. Thanks in advance!
 
Yes, you can use two hard drives. Just set the old hard drive to slave. It could work together as one, meaning as in RAIDing them together. But in order to do that, both would have to be the same model hard drive. And it would require you to wipe out both hard drives, to pull it off.
 
Thanks for replying!
"it would require you to wipe out both hard drives."
well I wouldent want to do that even if I could. But, they are both western digitals but different versions. What would be the advantage if I set my old one as a slave?
 
Well you can't set the old hard drive to master, because the other hard drive with Vista is the master.
 
basically there are two types of configurations

you can just add it which will mean that it appears as harddrive D: on "my computer" you will need to format the old hdd to remove the xp filesystem as you will want to use the full space of the hdd

you can raid which is where the disks become parry to special elements in programming but when you make a raid array all harddrives within that array get formatted and so lose all data. This isn't a problem you can back-up your data and and just re-install the Operating system (windows vista) after building the array I install a new operating system about one a month on my laptop. Raid arrays have their advantages the two basic ones are Raid) which is where both drives are added together to form one virtual drive this virtual drive has better performance as it can access the data quicker as two minds are better then one :). Raid 1 is where the data is mirrored this means an identical copy is made of one of the hdd's so if the hdd ever fails you have no issues as you have the backup hdd.

raid gives you a performance boost, standard doesn't but you don't have to reinstall the OS we can help you with both and you can ask as many questions as you like until your comfortable with what your doing. We are all here to help each other :)

make your choice then we will help you with the details with each :D
 
Nah i dont really wont to do a duel boot with vista and xp. So when I have the main hardrive running vista I could save something to my old hardrive. Just confused how this will work?
 
Thanks again saltynay and b1gapl. arg, My older hardrive has the ribbon thing and my newer one has sata? help, is this a dead end?
 
Thanks again saltynay and b1gapl. arg, My older hardrive has the ribbon thing and my newer one has sata? help, is this a dead end?

the ribbon means ide this isn't a dead end its just now you have to look on the back of the hdd and there should be instructions on how to arrange a little plastic jumper so that it becomes a slave drive
 
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