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By Root 1119 0

run forever, snugly tucked together in your old case. But slap a hot new 10,000 RPM drive in that same case and watch your system start crashing right and left!

You can deal with these very fast drives by adding drive bay fans between the drives or migrating to a more spacious case. Most enthusiasts end up doing both. Drive bay fans sit at the front of a bay and blow air across the drive. They range in price from $10 to $100 (US) and can lower the temperature of your drives dramatically. Some cases come with a bay fan built in (Figure 11-48).

Airflow in a case can make or break your system stability, especially when you add new drives that increase the ambient temperature. Hot systems get flaky and lock up at odd moments. Many things can impede the airflow—jumbled-up ribbon cables, drives squished together in a tiny case, fans clogged by dust or animal hair, and so on.

Figure 11-48 Bay fan

Technicians need to be aware of the dangers when adding a new hard drive to an older system. Get into the habit of tying off ribbon cables, adding front fans to cases when systems lock up intermittently, and making sure any fans run well. Finally, if a client wants a new drive for a system in a tiny minitower with only the power supply fan to cool it off, be gentle, but definitely steer the client to one of the slower drives!

Hybrid Hard Drives

Windows Vista supports hybrid hard drives (HHDs), drives that combine flash memory and spinning platters to provide fast and reliable storage, and offers ReadyBoost and Superfetch for faster caching and booting. Samsung has drives with 128-MB and 256-MB flash cache, for example, that shave boot times in half and, because the platters don’t have to spin all of the time, add 20–30 minutes more of battery life for portable computers. Adding that much more run time with only a tiny price premium and no extra weight is the Holy Grail of portable computing.

Chapter Review

Questions

1. John’s system is running INT13 extensions. What is the maximum size hard drive it can support?

A. 504 GB

B. 137 GB

C. 10 GB

D. 8.4 GB

2. How many PATA hard drives can you have on a system with two PATA hard drive controllers?

A. 1

B. 2

C. 3

D. 4

3. How do you differentiate two PATA drives on the same cable?

A. The flat ribbon cable has a seven-wire twist that determines which is which.

B. Set jumpers on the individual drives to determine which is master and which is slave.

C. The PATA controller determines the hierarchy.

D. Both drives are considered equal.

4. What happens if you cable a PATA hard drive incorrectly?

A. You can destroy that hard drive.

B. The data will be erased, but the hard drive will be okay.

C. The system will not be able to communicate with that hard drive.

D. Nothing. It doesn’t matter how the cable is set up; it doesn’t have the seven-wire twist.

5. John needs to install an old ATA/100-capable hard drive to check the contents before recycling it. Looking through his box of connectors, however, he finds no 80-wire cable, just a 40-wire cable. If he installs the ATA/100 drive with a 40-wire EIDE cable, what will happen?

A. The drive will work but will not run at the ATA/100 speed.

B. He might damage the motherboard.

C. He won’t be able to install the drive, because the cables are incompatible.

D. He will not be able to run in ATA mode.

6. What is the maximum cable length of an internal SATA device?

A. 2 meters

B. 12 inches

C. 18 inches

D. 1 meter

7. Which of the following is part of the ATA-7 standard?

A. Red controller connections on the motherboard

B. SATA

C. ATA/100

D. 1 meter maximum cable length

8. What is the maximum number of SATA drives you can have on a system?

A. One master, one slave

B. Two, with no master/slave distinction

C. Eight

D. There is no maximum other than the limitations of your motherboard.

9. Simon wants to connect his old PATA hard drive to the SATA controller in his new computer. What does he need to do this?

A. A SATA bridge