Build It!
NOVEMBER 2004 MA XIMUMPC 3
Before you can mount your hard
drives in your system, you need to
prep the drives. First, consult your
case manual and mount whatever
kind of rails or other gizmos neces-
sary to install your hard drives in
your case. Once that’s done, you
need to configure your drives for
your rig.
There are two basic interface
technologies used for hard drives
today: parallel ATA and Serial ATA.
You’re probably familiar with parallel
ATA, which uses the wide, old-fash-
ioned, 80-pin ribbon cables, but you
may not have encountered Serial
ATA drives yet. You can connect two
devices to a single parallel ATA port,
but connect only one to a Serial ATA
port. We’re going to explain how to
configure both.Parallel ATA
When you’re connecting a parallel
ATA drive to your system, whether
it’s a hard drive or optical drive,
it’s very important you configure
the drive’s master or slave settings.
Parallel ATA drives connect to theIDE ports on your mobo. Each port
is a single IDE channel. Remember,
even though each IDE channel can
support two drives (one drive con-
figured as master and another con-
figured as slave), your system will
only be able to read or write to one
drive at a time—this is important to
keep in mind when configuring your
parallel ATA devices. We’ve prepared
three sample IDE configs at the bot-
tom of this page.
A parallel ATA drive’s master/
slave setting is almost always con-
figured with a series of small plastic
jumpers. Put the jumper over one
pair of pins, and the drive is set to
master. Put it over the other, and it’s
set to slave. It’s that simple.Serial ATA
Configuring Serial ATA drives is much
easier than parallel ATA drives. There
are no annoying master/slave set-
tings, and you don’t have to worry
about drives sharing channels. Your
PC can access any Serial ATA drive at
any time, no matter what other drives
are being accessed.HARD DRIVE AND OPTICAL DRIVE
ON SEPARATE CHANNELS: This is
an extremely common configuration.
Because each drive has its own channel,
the system can access both drives at
the same time. The performance is espe-
cially appreciated when you’re copying
large volumes of data from an optical
drive to the hard drive.HARD DRIVE ON ONE CHANNEL, TWO
OPTICALS ON THE SECOND CHANNEL:
This setup places your hard drive on the
primary channel while two optical drives
share the secondary IDE channel. This
setup provides great optical drive to
hard disk performance for either optical
drive, but is practically useless for opti-
cal-to-optical disc copying because both
drives share the same channel.EACH DRIVE ON ITS OWN CHANNEL:
In a perfect world, each hard drive and
optical drive has its own IDE channel.
All drives can work simultaneously,
preventing any confusing situations like,
say, using one optical drive for CD copy-
ing, but the other for disc-to-disc copies
because of IDE channel concerns. If you
don’t plan on using RAID, you can use
these ports for secondary hard drives or
optical drives.Modern systems have several IDE adapters, which makes IDE configuration decisions quite perplexing.
Here are the three most common optical drive configurations, and pros and cons for each.Three Tried-and-True Parallel ATA Drive Configurations
Step 13 : Mount the hard drives
This is another step that varies on a case-
by-case basis. For most case enclosures,
you’ll want to slide your hard drives into
one of the 3.5-inch bays with the connec-
tor side facing out. Once the drives are in
the bay, line up the holes on the side of
the drive with the holes in the bay, and
screw the drive into place. We recom-
mend using two screws on each side of
the drive; more is overkill, and less is
dangerous because your drives won’t be
stable enough.
Some newer cases use a tool-less
mechanism to lock the hard drives into
place. Installing your drives in these
is simple. All you have to do is put the
drive in the bay and slide the locking
mechanism into place until it clicks.
Easy, huh?Step 12 : Prep your hard drives