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newbie hard drive questions


kendo
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Im Copying 4.6gig dvd videos to my hard drives

I have a 50gig (C:) drive originally in the computer: it takes 20 minutes

and an 80gig Maxtor external (F:) drive: it takes 10 minutes

and a newly installed 160gig Western Digital internal (G:) drive: it takes an HOUR

It's gonna take for ever to transfer all these videos!

The external drive is connected with fire wire, would that make it faster, if so...

any way to speed up copying to the new internal drive, or did i just buy a slow one?

Dell Dimension 4550

Pentium 4 CPU 2.53GHz

@.52 GHz, 768 MB RAM

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The internal drives are connected in series with 40 ide cable directly to the motherboard with the 50gig (C:) designated master

the guy at best buy sold me a $50 controller card and said the computer wouldnt see the full capacity without it

theres no slot that fits this card in my computer and the entire capacity is recognized anyway because its windows xp sp-2

I dont know how to check DMA and im not sure what you mean by optical and sata drives

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Drive speeds vary. A faster turning drive (like 7,500 rpm) will generally perform more quickly than a slower (5,000 rpm) drive, assuming the drive is the bottleneck. Also, if you have your 160 gig drive on the same cable/controller as the CD, it will take longer because the communication becomes slower because it must cache the information before it can write. Hope that explains it. If this is too technical, please ask me to restate it. :)

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The internal drives are connected in series with 40 ide cable directly to the motherboard with the 50gig (C:) designated master

the guy at best buy sold me a $50 controller card and said the computer wouldnt see the full capacity without it

theres no slot that fits this card in my computer and the entire capacity is recognized anyway because its windows xp sp-2

I dont know how to check DMA and im not sure what you mean by optical and sata drives

The guy at best buy told you a apck of lies, controller card can be used with older BIOS's to correctly recongines large HDD. But as you've seen wih SP2, the drives capacity is recongnised correctly.

To check DMA, click start, control panel, system, hardware, device manager...

see pic below.

Sorry,i dont know what you mean by how they're set up in relation to the cd dvdr/w drives

Are both HDD conneted to each other - Master/Slave or are they connected to your optical drive.

HDD [Master] Optical Drive [slave]

So why doesn't my computer have a pci slot wide enough for the controller card

if I were able to connect the drives in parallel to a controller card, would it be better?

would you recommend getting a big external drive instead?

Without seeing the card, can't tell you.

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OK, primary and secondary ide controllers set to ultra dma mode 2

the drives are connected to each other with the new one designated slave

and this is going to be a huge problem to me because not only does it take an hour for each disc to be saved to the drive (3 times as long as im used to ) BUT

it also takes an hour to burn that video file to a new disc using the same program ive been using (thats 3 times as long as im used to also)

See, I gather educational material from the web and have put together over 50 dvds of information that I am trying to produce as many copies as fast as i can.

I've found that by saving the productions as dvd video folders using roxio 7, it takes half as long as copying disc to disc every time.

now the problems with this new drive are making it take TWICE as long as copying disc to disc

by the way, I was wrong about the cable, its 80 not 40

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