I've cannibalized a couple Win95 machines (from back when IDE hard drives were hot stuff) and I'm about to pitch the carcasses.
It occurs to me, however, that an old 3.2 GB HD might be useful for daily data backups. I know that they're giving away HDs in cereal boxes these days and I know how to install them, so those aren't issues unless I'm about to cause harm or really drag down overall performance.
Our "new" box is an eMachines floor model, a 2 GHz AMD Athlon with 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM and a Western Digital 80 GB HD running WinXP Home. Its HD is all by itself on one IDE channel and the CD/DVD drives are on a second, so there's only room for one more drive and it'll have to share the WD HD's cable. It looks like the bus clock is running at 133 MHz.
The old HD is a 1997-vintage ATA-2 JTS Champion II. I haven't plugged it into the new machine yet, but I'm going to assume that the eMachine's BIOS will be able to recognize the drive and that WinXP will remember how to wipe/format it. All it'll do is daily backups of 1-2 MB of data folders from the master HD, probably handled by WinXP's scheduler. Of course I'd still be doing weekly CD data backups and occasional full settings backups.
What I don't know is what the old drive will do to the rest of the computer. Is an old HD likely to drag down the bus speed or affect data transfer? Will it load down the power supply or overheat the case? Am I looking at a BIOS "upgrade" or should I segregate the drives to separate IDE channels? Anyone have any horror stories on this subject?
It occurs to me, however, that an old 3.2 GB HD might be useful for daily data backups. I know that they're giving away HDs in cereal boxes these days and I know how to install them, so those aren't issues unless I'm about to cause harm or really drag down overall performance.
Our "new" box is an eMachines floor model, a 2 GHz AMD Athlon with 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM and a Western Digital 80 GB HD running WinXP Home. Its HD is all by itself on one IDE channel and the CD/DVD drives are on a second, so there's only room for one more drive and it'll have to share the WD HD's cable. It looks like the bus clock is running at 133 MHz.
The old HD is a 1997-vintage ATA-2 JTS Champion II. I haven't plugged it into the new machine yet, but I'm going to assume that the eMachine's BIOS will be able to recognize the drive and that WinXP will remember how to wipe/format it. All it'll do is daily backups of 1-2 MB of data folders from the master HD, probably handled by WinXP's scheduler. Of course I'd still be doing weekly CD data backups and occasional full settings backups.
What I don't know is what the old drive will do to the rest of the computer. Is an old HD likely to drag down the bus speed or affect data transfer? Will it load down the power supply or overheat the case? Am I looking at a BIOS "upgrade" or should I segregate the drives to separate IDE channels? Anyone have any horror stories on this subject?