Master and Slave type on Win7

[dennis2]

Hi the last time I had two hard drives on one PC was way back in the 90's. During that time, I would set a master/slave setup on my hard drive. I was running this type of setup on Windows 95 and Windows 95 version B (aka Win 97). After I gave my computer to my dad, I wasn't able to duplicate the same setup anymore since it is not necessary for me to do so anymore.

Now I plan to buy an additional hard drive to just store my mp3 files, h264 movies, documents etc. on that hard drive. But I want the second hard drive to function independtly on it's own. Just in case, I have to reformat my computer. I would just format the main hard drive and leave the other hard drive as is. I believe that the master/slave setup is already obsolete and now replaced by raid. I was watching a video on youtube about setting up raid on your computer. Raid Zero would combine the two hard drives and make them appear as one on Windows 7. What kind of Raid do I need to select in order to have the same type of setting (Master/Slave) on my computer?

 

[Hawkeye22]

You don't need RAID. If these are both IDE drives, set your current drive to master and the new drive to slave. If these are SATA drives, there is no master/slave setup, just install it on an open SATA port and make sure the SATA port you have it plugged into is enabled in the BIOS.

 

[dennis2]

It's a SATA Hard drive boss. So if I follow your instructions correctly. I wouldn't have to do raid on those sata hard drives correct? Windows 7 would recognize these drives as independent drives?

 

[Hawkeye22]

Correct, I have 6 drives in my Win7 machine. Drives C, E, F, G, H, X, and Z.

Note: E is my CD/DVD drive and X and Z are two partions on one drive. That is a 1TB drive partitioned into a 700Gb NTFS (X drive) and 300Gb FAT32 (Z drive).

After installing the drive, you'll need to go into disk management, initialize the drive, format it, and assign it a drive letter, in order for it to show up in windows.

 

[Paperdoc]

In older machines you remember, all HDD's were on IDE ports. Each IDE port and cable can support TWO HDD units and they each need a unique identifier. The system then was to make a Master and a Slave on each IDE port.

With today's SATA systems there is only ONE drive on each SATA port, and there is no need for Master and Slave so they no longer exist on SATA systems. (They do still continue for IDE ports on a mobo).

The other thing you're remembering is that it used to be almost all systems set (some had no option - it just WAS this way) the Primary IDE Port Master unit as the boot device that was known as the C: Drive. All others were non-boot units usually, and it was common but incorrect to call those all "Slave" drives. In today's systems the BIOS has a place where you specifically tell it which hardware device is the boot device. In fact, you tell it a sequence of devices to try, and any that are NOT in the sequence will not be used for booting purposes. For example, on my machine I have it set to try to boot from the floppy drive first; if that fails, then try the first optical drive; if that fails, try the HDD on the SATA_1 port; do not try any other hardware. I have a floppy drive, two optical drives, two internal SATA HDD's, and an external HDD. Only ONE HDD can be used for booting, and it will be the C: drive. All the others are NOT "Slaves", they are just other drive units used for data.