How to Build Your Own PC - Save A Buck And Learn A Lot  9  Chapter 5: Installing Drives       9  Installing the Hard Drive

Setting Hard Drive Jumpers 1 IDE Cables and Connectors

If we were to place another hard drive in the system, we could make it secondary and put it on the same cable as the primary drive. Use the fastest drive with the largest buffer as your primary drive to maximize the speed of your operating system.

With drives cheap today (you can get a 40 GB drive for $40), you might want to install a second hard drive as a back up. Then, just drag and drop copies of your most important files to the second drive. Of course, you can also back up to a CD-RW or DVD burner. The chances of both drives failing and your losing data is very slim.

Some mainboards support RAID, which means redundant array of independent disks. RAID writes data to more than one hard drive at the same time, so that if one drive fails, you won’t lose data. However, if you make back ups regularly, you probably won’t need RAID for a home system. The chances of one hard drive failing is pretty slim.

If you want RAID, you can choose a mainboard that supports RAID or else purchase an expansion card that gives RAID capability.

Setting Hard Drive Jumpers 1 IDE Cables and Connectors