Should 2nd drive be same brand?

[Menno]

In the good ol' days most people said that if you were planning on installing a second harddisk, it better be of the same brand as the first one.
My system disk is a Maxtor 6.4 Gb (udma).
Should I buy another miss Maxie for homeboy Marvel, or doesn't this matter much anymore?

If not, any suggestions (about 20-30 Gb)?

tia

[jeff b]

If you've got a second IDE controller port for the second hard disk, it would never matter. The master/slave configuration of two drives on the same ribbon cable, though, used to sometimes be a problem when mixing different brands of hard drives. I don't know if incompatibilities still exist the way they did a few years ago, though.

[This_Idiot]

Jeff, I think that this problem has largely been overcome over the last couple of years, although it is certainly true that some drives used to hate being slaved to other brands.

Menno, I don't think that you should worry about this too much. If you were running a Promise Raid then the recommendation would be to twin up two identical make/models in order to maximise it's effect.

Otherwise, just make sure that you buy from a reputable store with a decent returns policy

[Menno]

Jeff and T_I,
thanks for the re's.

Well, it's gonna be the master/slave thing, because on the second IDE are my CDrom and CDwriter, and although both the CD machines are DMA enabled, I like to keep my HD's and CD's apart if possible.
Maybe I'll buy the hardware you were writing about T_I, but only if the normal "dumping to the new disk" procedure won't work satisfying enough.

[This_Idiot]

Absolutely Menno.

Fasttrak is nice to have, but under normal circumstances isn't a necessity.

A second HD should work fine, and I also use Master/Slave on the primary IDE port (without a problem).

[Captain Marvel]

I have a WD 8.4 UDMA 66 as primary on channel 1 and a Maxtor Diamond max+ UDMA 66 7200 as a slave on the same channel and they seem to work fine.

[Brian Ellis]

Hi!

As the others have ably said, you can now safely mix makes, whereas this was a no, no! a few years ago.

However, I do recommend you make your two HDDs the masters on IDE0 and IDE1 respectively and your two CDs the slaves. As far as the CDs are concerned, you will not notice the difference, but you will notice the difference with the HDDs. If you have them master/slave on the same port, you can DMA only one at a time, so that you cannot read/write to your video disk while something is happening to your other one, such as swap file activity, because the port shares its resources. On different ports, there is less sharing, because the signals come from different port ICs and are interleaved into the memory bus at the fastest level. With video, this can make the difference between dropped frames and no dropped frames (this is not just theory, I have noticed this in practice: I had a few dropped frames until I re-configured my drives on the ports.)

------------------
Brian (the terrible)