Western jDigital and Seagate Hard Drives..Compatilbe?

[willoverton303]

I have a 13 Western hard drive that I want to make a slave to a new Seagate 40 hard drive.......Are these 2 hard drives compatible?

Thanks in advance:confused:

[tarpat1]

You should be able to do this with no problem. Make sure that you set the jumper(s) correctly on each drive. ie set the Seagate as Master and the Western Digital as slave.

[Fingers]

Yep... all modern IDE drives are interchangeable. If your mobo supported the 13GB... it should be able to handle the 40GB also. Just set the jumpers on both drives properly and make sure you set your BIOS to recognize the new configuration.

If the new drive came with a new 80-conductor cable, use that one to connect the drives, that way you can take advantage of all the new drives features (as long as your mobo also supports them)

Good luck, and WELCOME BACK :)

[otheos]

If your mobo supported the 13GB... it should be able to handle the 40GB also.

Well, the next compatibility limit (remember, 512MB, 2.1GB, 8.4GB) is actually 32GB. Depending on the IDE controller (chipset) you might need to set the 40Gigabyte drive to only 32GB (there is a jumper at the back of the drive).

While this has nothing to do with your original question (as they are compatible), if your motherboard does not support greater than 40GB it will not recognise the drive when you hook it up. Once master/slave is set and you still have problems, try the "limit to 32GB" jumper and see if it makes any difference. If it does, head to your mobo manufacturer for a bios update.

If your IDE controller is ATA66/100 chances are the above is not applicable and all 40GB of it will work. As Fingers suggested, get a 80core 40pin cable for that to get max performance.

[Axel]

The IDE channel will tend to slow down to the read / write speed of the slowest drive because they are sharing a channel as primary and slave -

If you can, place the faster drive on the primary IDE channel by itself and place the slave as a slave on the CD-Rom IDE channel -

This assumes you'll probably only be using the slave as cold file storage -

If you have a CD burner - it should not be placed on the primary hard drive IDE channel either - you get faster burns, typically, if you have the data and OS on a drive riding a channel other than the one the burn is happening on - after all - the OS still has to run while the burn is taking place -

[otheos]

..... and people say SCSI is complicated......tsk tsk tsk.