Slow Boot up due to second hard drive (?)

eday2010

Ok, so fast fall I bought a new PC P4 3.0Ghz, 1gig of RAM, a 200 gig drive, Gigabyte Motherboard with Intel chipset. After some complications and a hard drive failure, I buy and 80gig just for the OS and programs. Everything is chipper. I get my drive back from the manufacturer, and get a very long IDE cable since the drive has to go up top to have a dvd burner as the slave.

Anyhow, I install it, turn on the computer, aand find that nothing on the 2nd IDE channel shows up. Hmmm...so I connect just the hard drive with an IDE cable that came with the machine. It shows up. I decide in the end, to connect the 80 gig and a dvd burner on the first channel, and the second hard drive on the second channel and the other burner on the third channel, or vice versa.

Anyhow, once I installed the second hard drive and everyting, my machine, which should be super fast, boots into windows slowly and isn't as super fast as it should be. It's been that way since the second drive went in. Anyone know why the computer would boot up slower and log off slower after that second drive went in? It's a Maxtor 250gig 7200 rpm, 16mb cache (i think).

Donutey

Basically, only put hard drives on one channel, and optical drives on another.

Optical drives typically run at slower speed such as ATA/66 or ATA/33, while all newer IDE hard drives are ATA/100 or ATA/133. The channel bumps down to the slowest device speed. Also, IDE cables shouldn't be longer than 18 inches, or else you'll get interference and the speed will go down.

Hope that helps.

eday2010

Actually, I was told by a computer technician that I worked with that optical drives should never be on the same channel because it slows down the copying of discs. He said the hard drive should always be the master and the optical drive the slave. Oddly enough, when I first got my computer, the hard drive was actually the SLAVE to the dvd burner. It wasn't slow at all.

Anyhow, none of my calbes are over 18 inches since th board didn't want to see the 3 foot IDE server cable. And the second hard drive is on it's own channel, as is the second optical drive.

The computer doesn't seem to be slow these days, but sometimes it is. Could be that there is too much stuff installed, but I've minimized the start up items through MSConfig. There are only 6 things starting on startup. The test will come when I have t oreinstall Windows one day. Then I'll get to see how it acts.