HP d530 CMT IDE HARD DRIVE maximum size

[Alvin_Kirui]

How much memory can each IDE Hard Drive port be maxed out at? there are 2 of them

Was also curious about what will happen if you install two Hard Drives on the IDE port and don't set the second one as slave, will you be able to load/transfer files to it?

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome back to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

I have to jog my memory on this question.

I would think you are limited to about 2 TBs (Link) of storage space on each drive.

You would have to set the second drive as a slave drive. This required setting jumpers on older drives.

I have not done this since the 1990s.  I don't know if you can buy higher capacity IDE drives now.

I don't do this so it is very hard to answer your question.

You may be able to use a SATA to IDE adapter (Link) to connect a larger capacity HDD or SSD to an an older PC.

Regards

[Alvin_Kirui]

There are 2 SATA ports on the motherboard so I can still use a SATA HDD

Was just curious to know what effect not setting the second IDE drive as a slave would have on it

[Grzwacz]

Hi Alvin_Kirui,

I did not check your PC specs. Thought you only had IDE interface.

Using two IDE HDDs on one data cable requires setting the second IDE HDD as a slave drive.

This is not required if you connect the second IDE HDD to a separate IDE port.

Regards

[Alvin_Kirui]

The HDDs are on one IDE cable, so what would be the effect of not setting the second drive to be a slave, will it be read, will you be able to transfer files to it?

Also, there are two IDE ports on the motherboard but one is for HDD the other is for CD-ROM, can you use them interchangeably?

[Hibb1]

From memory (it's been a while) you don't necessarily need to set a master, but I think you need to set a slave.

There's no harm in trying, but I think you'll confuse the system and it'll ignore one drive or both if you don't set a slave. You won't lose any data just by trying.

Why would you NOT want to set one as slave? Don't you have a jumper cap or something?

A normal setup would be: On IDE channel 1: HDD jumpered to master, HDD jumpered to slave

On IDE channel 2: DVD Drive jumpered to master. You *may* get better performance if you have one HDD as primary master and the other hdd as secondary master and set the DVD drive to slave on either channel.

As long as you get the master/slave jumpers correct you can interchange as much as you like. It doesn't matter which connector on the cable you use. IDE don't care. Floppy cable does though. Above the twist is A: and below the twist is B:

If you don't already, get an 80pin IDE cable instead of the 40pin. Some newer IDE drives need the 80pin to work properly.