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 2)

Chasbo

on Aug 24, 2008

My hp is fried...well the motherboard, power supply and a few other things are gone.

That's just about the same thing that happened to me in June this year. Now I have 2 HD's and it's great. Now a days it's essential. Wouldn't want it any other way.

teddybearcholla

on Aug 24, 2008

What motherboard are they putting in this?

No motherboard...I already had a new pc, I just want to add anything from the old one that can be useful, to the new one, where there is lots of room.

That's just about the same thing that happened to me in June this year. Now I have 2 HD's and it's great

MadDeez

on Aug 24, 2008

teddy, they may not be adding a new motherboard but the new system has a new motherboard in it. as yrag stated, most new motherboards have only one IDE controller. if your new system has an IDE harddrive and IDE CD-ROM drive, you won't be able to add your old HHD if it is an IDE drive. if the new system has a SATA HDD and your old HHD is an IDE unit, you're good. I'd bet money the new system uses a SATA harddrive. if the new system has a SATA drive and your old drive is SATA, you should be ok since most mobo's have multiple SATA controllers.

teddybearcholla

on Aug 24, 2008

Thank you very very much Snidely. *hugs* Thinking, maybe I would be better, just making it an external harddrive that I can plug in whenever I need it.

ColdSteelRain

on Aug 24, 2008

Something from the OP that no one addressed -- you may have a second copy of a program on the old drive, but if you don't re-install it, it may not work properly. Some programs are pretty sensitive about this, some aren't. I recommend reinstalling, copying any data over if you need it, and then reclaiming the space from the old drive.

Also, if you connect your old hard drive to the same IDE channel as the CD/DVD drive, the performance will be pretty bad. The IDE channel operates at the speed of the slower device for moving data.

scorpNZ

on Aug 24, 2008

In your power options you can set "TURN OFF HARD DISKS" after x amount of time,basicly it switches off any hdd that's not in use,it most probably does'nt save much in way of power but no point in having a drive continual spinning either,i use that option for my small 4GB 2ndry which is used as my pagefile

stykman22

on Aug 24, 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

Holy crap...what are you, the archivist for the Library of Congress??

Zyxpsilon

on Aug 24, 2008

...if the new system has a SATA drive and your old drive is SATA, you should be ok since most mobo's have multiple SATA controllers.

Exactly what my initial point was, explained properly this time by someone else.

dragoaskani

on Aug 24, 2008

The point still stands. You have to be very careful taking technical advice from other human beings. Especially ones you don't know. Its much safer to go to valid computer sites that have solid reputations for their information and reliability. That being said forums can be very helpful but all information should be taken with a grain of salt. Also double check everything you are told before ever implementing into your own machine for a wide variety of reasons.

Bebi Bulma

on Aug 24, 2008

yrag is knowledgeable and quite reliable.

yrag

on Aug 24, 2008

yrag is knowledgeable and quite reliable.

Thanks Steph.

.....in actuality, I know all.

teddybearcholla: you have a PM (I can't keep a straight face in this thread any longer

dragoaskani

on Aug 25, 2008

one knowledgeable person in the sea of internet idiocy does in no way, shape, or form refute my advice.

Puglord

on Aug 25, 2008

I'll add my two cents here as I recently had a similar issue: motherboard finally gave up the ghost after five years of abuse and my one year old daughter banging on the on/off switch as a form of 'sparkly power light LED entertainment'.

The hard drive managed to survive this and was okay. Rest of system didn't fare so well! Time for a complete gut-out of box and upgrade! Happy days.

So picked up new motherboard, CPU, 2Gig of ram, two 250Gig SATA(II) hard drives, video card, new power supply unit. Ripped out guts and packed in the new gear. Hooked up the two SATA drives to motherboard and configured in a RAID 1 set-up (mirroring). In layman's terms, RAID 1 makes a complete back-up of one hard drive to another. (I used to like nothing better than fiddling with wiping-out hard drives and reinstalls for days on end. Don't really have the time these days, so RAID 1 is now my current preference). You can also set up the two hard drives in a RAID 0 set-up, which effectively spreads the data across two disks. IE: Two 120 Gig hard drives would give you a total of 240 Gig.

There are other RAID set-up's, but they start to use more than two hard drives and get a bit complicated to explain with regards to parity error functionality and mirror / striping combinations.

Took me a while to get video card working: Long story short, had to update motherboard BIOS, which helped with over current supply power settings to video card. Go figure.

Reinstalled all programs on new HDD's and system from scratch. As ColdSteelRain pointed out, simply transferring the programs from old to new can cause problems with motherboard conflicts, registry entries not matching up, etc.

Transferred all data from original HDD to new HDD's, and clean wiped old HDD. Will chuck old HDD into an external caddy at a later date to use as an external hard drive.

In regards to your OP, I would probably recommend using the 'old' hard drive as an external unit, sticking it in a caddy and using it as an external back-up, or portable device for extra storage, etc. RAID set-ups work at their best efficiency when the two internal hard drives are identical.

Or, as per other posts, you could have it in system as a separate drive internally on a different letter IE: D:, but in that case, why not have it externally? Gives you the ability to cart around, hook up to work computer for file transferring, etc.

If internally, will 'old' HDD always be on? Yup, as long as the box is fired up and receiving juice, it sure will! (Unless the internal HDD doesn't have the internal power attached! ) Externally, you can turn the caddy off and unplug HDD whenever you want. Caddy will have to accomodate the type of connection 'old' hard drive is IE: IDE or SATA, and then I think externally, they come with a number of different style of connections form caddy to computer. (USB, firewire, wireless, etc). Ask your tech guy for a bit of advise on this, as he knows your system better than we do!

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