Harddrive compatibility question.

[RobertR.]

Is it true that you need to have 2 compatible harddrives in order to make them work? If it is true, can you tell me if a maxtor and a seagate harddrive will work?

[KURIAKI]

Is not true, who says that?
I have Maxtor, Seagate, Western and IBM HDD's in the same machine at this time.

[RobertR.]

Thanks. i have over heard it from to people talking on the street and i didnt get to hear the whole conversation so i wondered about that if it is true or if it is false.

Thank you once again.

[Ritchie]

I also second that what you have overheard is incorrect.

The majority of systems I work with have only 1 hard drive and usually a DVD or CD drive. They work perfectly in this configuration. You can use as many hard drives as the board supports, usually up to four, on some boards up to eight, and these can be of different brands and sizes and a mix of S-ATA and P-ATA drives. Depending on the drives used you may need to vary jumper configurations slightly to get different combinations of drives to work as you wish, but you are almost guaranteed that the vast majority of drive combinations will work and you are far more likely to run into capacity limitation problems than compatiblity between different drives and boards by themselves.

The only other thing I should mention is that I have come across that occassionally when a HDD is jumpered as master on one board, it may not detect on a different board unless it is jumpered cable select. Or vice versa. But I'm not sure if I have come across any situation where a drive would not detect on a board at all unless the drive or board was faulty.


And a Merry Xmas to all.

[RobertR.]

Ok thanks for the info. Merry X-mas to you to.