Can a pc work with 2 hard drives?

Do two Outlook Express in the same pc work together?

Published on August 23, 2008 By teddybearcholla In Personal Computing

My hp is fried...well the motherboard, power supply and a few other things are gone. The hard drive is fine, as is the cd burner and a kool neon fan. Anyway my pc guy will install in this , my new one... the cd thing , I don't think it hurts to have an extra, and he said he can put the hard drive inside the pc as well, or I can have it as an external hard drive, just plugging it in when I want to use it. My question is, if it is installed internally that means it will always be *on*...so in essence there will be two Outlook Express, etc. and is this good or not?
Thanks much for any help!!!

Comments (Page 1)

Kitkun

on Aug 23, 2008

I would guess the tech would install it as a secondary drive. You would have the main drive (Just like it was before), and the secondary drive would be an extra place to store things.

Windexglow

on Aug 23, 2008

I'm sure it can; techically mine has 3 hard drives.

1 internal is my main one.
1 internal is a 'backup' one, I'm not exactly sure the purpose of it. Windows crucial files I guess
1 external is my secondary main one. Ran out of room on my main one so I'm using this now.

Frankief

on Aug 23, 2008

Having two internal drives is great. I have two and store all of my music, graphics and documents there leaving my main drive free for the operating system. I even have my space consuming programs installed on the second drive. It helps me to stay more organized, if that is possible!!!

Zyxpsilon

on Aug 23, 2008

Depending on many factors ranging from OS to the mobo specs, one could fit as many as four different PHYSICAL drives in any given 'modern' towers.

- PSU must have the required feeding rails.

- IDE slots (be it ATA or better) should have their dedicated master_slave configuration accordingly.

- The conventional enumeration process should detect any 'settings & hardwares' as long as the mobo specs are within their limits.

I once had an old PC with three drives in it (most were also partitionned with logical schemas, btw) and a single CD reader tied with the 2nd IDE cable as slave, and everything was running smooth and i could access all as long as the BIOS was detecting any on boot.

More important is the OS limits; old systems couldn't tackle any drives above the 40Gigs size and even then, some mobos wouldn't stick up with bigger drives than 12Gigs. Besides, that the main OS ***must*** initialize from a primary partition (or able to dual-boot with another if one setup has such capacity through external programs)... the physical limit on drives is more about how many gigs must be allocated than the maximum number of four 'items'.

One thing to note though is that in certain high-end 'monster_machines' (servers, comes to mind) the 4 max rule doesn't really apply.

But we're talkin' personal PC, right?

teddybearcholla

on Aug 23, 2008

Yes, sorry, it is a personal pc....AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+
2.21 GHz. 960MB RAM .... Thank you Kitkun, Windexglow, Frankief and Zyxpsilon!!

And I also like the idea of trying to be more organized.... Frankie sounds like you have a very good setup!!

CommanderAdama

on Aug 23, 2008

I have 5 Hard Drives

2 Raptors in RAID (Internal)
1 500GB WDHDDSATA (Internal)
1 1TB WD HDDESATA (External)
1 250GB WD Laptop (Extenral)

dragoaskani

on Aug 23, 2008

Amazingly he could have just used an internet search engine and found the answers quicker, in more depth, and without having someone hold his hand.

teddybearcholla

on Aug 23, 2008

Thank you CommanderAdama!! dragoaskani...yes could have, but thought maybe it would be useful to someone else as well, it is always good to hear other peoples experiences, ideas, etc. and *she* does not need anyone to hold her hand.

Cavan1

on Aug 23, 2008

Amazingly he could have just used an internet search engine and found the answers quicker, in more depth, and without having someone hold his hand.

This is a community, we are here to help other members. This is a question about TBC's personal computer posted in the Personal Computing section of the forums.

Kitkun

on Aug 23, 2008

Besides, if everybody looks for an answer to somebody else's question, there won't be anybody asking it in the first place.

yrag

on Aug 23, 2008

What motherboard are they putting in this? Most today don't have 2 IDE ports.

Bebi Bulma

on Aug 23, 2008

What motherboard are they putting in this? Most today don't have 2 IDE ports.

Indeed, mine only has 1 and 4 SATA connectors. My system drive is still IDE until I get around to switching it out for a small SATA drive.

Zyxpsilon

on Aug 24, 2008

Hold it, there's some technicalities 'definition' that should be straigthened up i guess.

Available Buses, ScSi & SATA connectors, IDE(s) controller, number of physical slots in the casing itself... all more important than the next.

Like i said, the mobo dictates how & why the HDs array deploy and if the Bios doesn't detect the 'supposedly' compatible elements installed there's nothing else anyone can do but either get the adequate mobo specs or simply forget adding what simply can't.

The 500Gigs Sata i got along with the pretty recent gear (Acer 5640, boosted & adapted, manufactured just this January) i bought is on IDE-1 (bus_0, master) and the Blue_Ray DVD_CD_SCSI is using the second IDE (bus_2) -- considering the Raid array could still be there if needed eventually.

Zyxpsilon

on Aug 24, 2008

And since, someone brought up the 'organized' settings...

C_D_E_F_G_H_I

(It's been like this for years, the only things that changed is how the physical devices are fitted into the tower)

H_ is always the CD_DVD stuff.

I_ was an Iomega zip drive before but now, it's simply a virtual slot locked as 4.6+ to copy_move DVD folders as a whole and straight burning.

C_ core OS, either as a full drive or partitioned once the usual hidden OS stuff is left on its slam refer tag space.

DEFG_ were created off a second drive, but not this time around.

And since, there is a firewire_1394 too, i suppose i could also go the EXTERNAL way which counts as any extra drives also.

J_ is an onlooker for USB sticks (8 total in the tower, 4 backs filled with key/mouse/audio/printer, 4 front as often as necessary) -- that one used to be a CD rewriter slaved on IDE2.

Daemon received it's usual 4 (KLMN). Mostly temp Isos and testing phases for compiler works. C++ or VB stiffers.

OPQR_ are carding callers once snapped in.

The essential are named... Core (140), Data(43,8), Extra(18,6), Filer(20,8), Games(227 **GC2, btw)

D_ata; gets all & each personal files - no programs, all graphics reference stuff and right now, the GalCiv2 mods i'm developping.

E_xtra; Audio, Video, Drawing, Coders, 3D... programs only.

F_iler; All transitions... like Downloads, Uploads, a WRITE2CD & a WRITE2DVD drop zone folders growing and burnt out as often as needed. FTP searches, ImageShack files, Unzipped temporary, ISO, etc.

Of course, this is rather "unique" as everyone may have a totally different way of setting their systems.

Sarissi

on Aug 24, 2008

I have 4 hard disks in my computer, 3 PATA and 1 SATA, plus a PATA dvd burner and one FDD. Also have an external hdd.

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