1. A slave drive is, indeed, the second drive in your computer. Your first hard drive is your master, and your second hard drive is your slave. It's designated by the IDE cable and jumper settings on the back of the hard drive. (e.g. you'd connect the IDE cable first to the master drive, and then to the slave drive. also, you'd set the jumper cables to their slave setting). In most cases (not always), unless you're dual booting, you'll want to run your operating system off of the first partition of your master drive.

Installing a hard drive consists of:

1. Turning the computer off.
2. Mounting the hard drive in the computer's chassis (case).
3. Daisy-chaining the IDE ribbon cable from the old hard drive to the new hard drive.
4. Connecting a free power cable from the power supply into the new hard drive.
5. Checking the drive's manual for the correct jumper settings for a slave drive, and setting those jumper settings (manually on the back of the drive).
6. Turning the computer on and making sure that the BIOS correctly recognized the new drive.
7. Booting up into Windows and formatting the new drive from the Windows explorer.

2. You can install any program to your secondary (slave) hard drive. However, if you already have an operating system installed on the primary drive, you'll want to keep it there. If you have programs installed on the primary drive that you will want to move to the secondary drive, you'll have to uninstall them, and then reinstall them to their new location.

3. Installing a hard drive should not screw up your machine. However, if you've never done this before (or aren't an expert at it) then you should definitely back-up your important data to removable media such as a CD-R or zip drive, just in case.

4. Windows XP can format a partition as either FAT32 or NTFS. If your partition is over a certain size (I think it's 32 gig but I'm not sure) then WinXP will ONLY format as NTFS (although you can still format as FAT32 from DOS or Windows 2000). To format a new drive, simply right click on it from Windows Explorer and choose Format from the popup menu. The dialog box that pops up will notify you that it will be formatted via NTFS.

i just have a few more questions.
1) on a scale of 1-10 one being the easiest, 10 the hardest what do you rate installing and formating a hard drive at?
2) Will the programs run slower or take longer to access if installed on a slave drive?

btw, I opened my computer to check if i could install another hardrive and I found this 2 flat grey wires one had master writen on it another had slave writen on it and there was also black, orange ,and yellow wires all connected to a white square connector is that the power? and when i get the hard drive will it tell be how to set up the slave jumpers?

Yes, all will be answered when you purchase the drive. And the flat grey cable is the IDE cable, and the one with the four wires coming out of it is the molex power connection.

And for your scale, it's about a 1 to install a hard drive, maybe a 4 (if you don't know what you're doing). It should tell you what to do in the manual that comes with the drive.

Oh.

Technically, it will access things slower, since they will be on the same IDE channel. IDE doesn't read and write on a channel at the same time, let alone read/read, write/write, read/write or write/read on a channel with two drives. When you load something from the slave drive, it has to page some data to virtual memory, which is largely a file on your primary drive, and if you're paying attention, IDE cannot do two things at once, it queues up.

Anyway that's neither here nor there, and in all honesty unless you're truly worried about it, say you have some hardcore digital movie editing to do, the performance "loss" is totally negligible. It is there, but not nearly pronounced enough to make a damn bit of difference.

So in other words you're saying that adding a second drive will make both drives run an equally teeny tad slower than either would run had it been in a computer alone?

What about my scenerio. One of my machines has a RAID0 array with one drive using parallel ATA and another running off of serial ATA.

The mac I have now has 2 serial ATA drives. What's the advantage to this? (They're not using RAID but I'm probably going to set it up in the near future.)

I found a 160GB hard drive the manufacturer is Maxtor its a 7200RPM internal hard drive with a 8MB cache is that good enough to store mp3s,movies, and programs?

Well, yes and no.

If you're accessing data from the slave drive (read), and you have your page file on the primary (write), yes, you'll see some slowdown. Not enough to notice, so it's really not that big of a deal.

One PATA, and the other SATA? How do you have that set up? An SATA adaptor? I'm assuming that would be a software based RAID set. With IDE RAID, it's ideal to have the drives on seperate channels. It's how I have my main drives set up...two drives on seperate channels on the PCI IDE RAID card I have.

SATA drives have their own channel, so no slow down as far as read/writes go.

Those are actually nice drives. The 8MB cache will help out with speed a little bit. I'd go ahead and pick one up.

All I have is the RAID set in my machine, and when I need more space (which could take months), I'll be picking up a few large capacity drives like that.