Installing a second Hard Disk

[dookie]

i'm thinking of saving myself a shitload of money and buying a hdd on ebay, something quite massive because i'm thinking of buying a copy of GTA: San Andreas.

i know from experience that some basic instructions for installation as a slave is provided on a handy sticker on the hdd itself. so let me begin with two questions.

the drive should come with an IDE jumper cable?

it's pretty straightforward installing the drive?

 

[Descent]

1: Yes, the drive will come with a jumper.

2: The installation is straightfoward: Set the jumper, hook up the IDE cable, hook up the power cable, then you are done.

The tricky part is formatting it, but Windows can do it for you, so that's not an issue.

Format it as NTFS. It's not really that hard to format it, it's just a tad daunting for a first time user.

 

[dookie]

thanks!

 

[Diesel]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you need a massive hard drive for GTA: San Andreas?

a) It's not even out yet. June 7th in North America, June 10th in Europe.
b) The hard drive size requirements shouldn't be that big. Vice City used 1.55GB for a full install.

In any case, make sure your system BIOS or IDE card supports large hard drives, or you may find yourself not able to access the full capacity of the drive.

Hardware-wise, the process is only complicated in logistics. If you have another device on the IDE controller, jumper the drive as slave, or set it to cable select and connect it to the slave connector on the IDE cable. If you don't, you can leave it as master, or set it to cable select and connect it to the master connector on the IDE cable. Make sure the BIOS recognizes the drive, and the proper capacity.

If you're running XP, the process is pretty simple. Open up Disk Management, create partitions of the sizes you require, and format the partitions. Pretty straightforward.

 

[Diesel]

One other note... because ebay doesn't seem to reflect any sort of real-world market economy most times, typical hard drive deals should reflect about $.50/GB. Any more than that, and it's not much of a deal.
Not sure what that would translate to in your local economy.

 

[Descent]

Don't get a

They're lollerifically bad. They sound like a marbleworks set and die whenever they want.

 

[BrIONwoshMunky]

Yeah, my 4 year old Maxtor blows ass too.

Any brand will inheriently have some lemons, Just hope you don't get one.

 

[Darklight]

I usually trust in Western Digital products even though I did have a drive failure once... control arm collapsed, destroying the contents of the drive in one swipe. kind of a sucky failure, I talked with wd for like a week about it to get the proper diagnosis.. lost a shit ton of info including two websites I was working on. lost a contract in the process.. come to think of it.. fuck you western digital..

 

[Jung]

lost a shit ton of info including two websites I was working on. lost a contract in the process.. come to think of it.. fuck you western digital..

Not to come off like a dick, but that's what happens when you don't back up your critical data. It took me one good time of losing some very important files to start taking backups seriously. I lost a whole 300GB raid array too. Fuck you, RAID 0.



We use nothing but Seagate and Yamaha drives for our servers at work; I've never had a problem with them. I personally won't use anything but Seagate or Western Digital at home. Maxtor has the highest failure rate of any drive on the market.

In short, stay away from Maxtor.

 

[Descent]

Yamaha

You mean Sumsung, right?

 

[Jung]

Yeah, my mistake. :hmph:

 

[Darklight]

Not to come off like a dick, but that's what happens when you don't back up your critical data. It took me one good time of losing some very important files to start taking backups seriously. I lost a whole 300GB raid array too. Fuck you, RAID 0.

nah its ok.. I was a tart for not backing my crap up... vicious learning experience..

 

[Hypertron]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you need a massive hard drive for GTA: San Andreas?

a) It's not even out yet. June 7th in North America, June 10th in Europe.
b) The hard drive size requirements shouldn't be that big. Vice City used 1.55GB for a full install.

you do know that one city in SA is equal to the whole game of VC and plus it takes up to 20 min to go from city to city, in the fastest car in the game i might add, so yeah its gonna be killer HD space.

 

[Diesel]

Okay, so let's say it's 3x the size of VC... you're still only looking at about 5GB.

Sorry, you don't need a "massive" hard drive for that. I have drives that are 8 years old that still work that will handle that.

It's all speculation anyway, since there haven't been any officially announced system requirements for it yet, including hard drive requirements. But chances are pretty good that a 250GB drive isn't necessary to play the game. Far less will suffice.

 

[Dragonfly]

We use nothing but Seagate and Yamaha drives for our servers at work

All Hail Seagate