Formatting & Parbreastioning Brand New Dell E510 51
I realize this is a big question. I have been surfing for a week and am...
Phusically, inside the case at the top is physical room for two 5 1-4 drives, one of which is your CD-DVD. There is a IDE cable that goes from the motherboard and has two connectors on the opposite end spaced far enough apart to connect to the two 5 1-4 drive bays.
Down at the bottom of the case are two locations for 31-2 drives. Your 160gig drive will be in one of those bays. The HD at the bottom connects to the MB with a single SATA cable. There are two SATA connectors on the MB, but Dell only supplies one SATA data cable.
That leaves one 5 1-4 drive bay avaiable at the top of the case. You can mount a 3 1-2 HD there if you use a 5 1-4 to 3 1-2 adapter. If that HD happens to be an IDE drive, then you can plug it right into the same IDE cable that goes to your CD-DVD. If it's an SATA drive, then you can connect it to the second SATA connector on the MB, but you'll have to supply the SATA data cable.
It also leaves one 3 1-2 drive slot at the bottom of the case. You can drop a secon HD in there just fine physically, but....
If it's a IDE drive, then you'll need to find and buy a long enough IDE cable that can reach to the top of the case for the CD-DVD and also reach down to the bottom of the case for the second HD.
Ok, here is what I'm thinking about getting: Dell E310 - 2.8GHz, XP home edition, 1GB of ram, 80GB hard drive, DVD drive and...
If it's a SATA drive, then again you can buy a SATA data cable and hook it up to the second SATA connector on the MB.
No matter how you look at it, The MB only supports two SATA drives and two IDE drives.
The case only has room internally, for two drives at the top of the case, and two at the bottom of the case.
If the two Maxtors happen to be IDE drives, then I would put each one of them in an external USB case and hook them up to the E510.
From what I've been able to tell with regards to network cases for HDs, is that the data transfer rates across the network is much slower than a standard USB port. Yes to gain because now the HD is attached to the network and is accessable to other systems on the network (with the pproper drivers on each network PC), but the transfer rates are slow.
You should be able to attach then to your PC via USB, then just share the drives.
Well, it wasn't my intention to get into this, but since you guys asked, here it is. (My apologies to...
Windows Media Center is essentialy Windows XP Home with some extra software installed on top of it.
The box was $1K even including upgrade to 1GB RAM. My wife doesn't like monitors over 17" (don't ask. A friend of mine...
Windows XP (no matter which version) can handle any size drive currently on the market with no problem. The system i'm on right now (XP Pro) currently has three HD's, a 74gig, a 300gig and a 400gig HD.
They each have only a single parbreastion on them.
The only 32gig limit refers to the first (boot parbreastion) on the first HD, and only if you parbreastion and format that drive when installing XP AND you choose FAT32 for THAT parbreastion.
Other than the first boot parbreastion that you create and format with XP, there is no limit on the remaining parbreastions.
Most people will end up just using NTFS instead of FAT32 anyway.
Formatting & Parbreastioning Brand New Dell E510 52
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