two hard drives ?

Annora · #1 10-17-2008, 11:22 AM

How can I tell if I am using two hard drives? Device manager only shows one disk drive. I was told when I purchased the computer there are 2 hard drives.

**gm9** · #2 10-17-2008, 11:49 AM

windows only shows logical drives. open your case, only way to be sure without extra software and even then.

**Landiin** · #3 10-17-2008, 11:51 AM

If you post screen is visible you can watch it and see how may SATA and/or ide drives it assigns.

**gm9** · #4 10-17-2008, 12:11 PM

depends on whether whatever controller he uses gives a message during POST

EQAditu · #5 10-17-2008, 02:21 PM

Right-click "My Computer", select "Manage". Click on the Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management node. On the top half you will see your logical drives... ignore that. On the bottom half you will see your physical drives. Each physical drive will also show which logical drives it contains. If you have "Disk 0" with C: and D: in it, you have one physical hard drive. If you have a "Disk 0" and "Disk 1", you have two physical hard drives. Of course if you do have a Disk 1, make sure it isn't just a card reader or something. It'll usually say "Basic" and "Online" if a hard drive. The icon is a good giveaway also.

Though technically, if Device Manager doesn't know about more than one drive, neither will this.

**gm9** · #6 10-17-2008, 03:29 PM

not on any windows version I have seen - disk management top half shows volumes, lower half shows logical drives...

**Landiin** · #7 10-18-2008, 12:46 AM

My XP and VISTA comps both show that information there. What OS you running GM?

**gm9** · #8 10-18-2008, 04:17 AM

All I see is Disk 0, Disk 1, etc. Those are logical drives, if you have several physical disks e.g. in a RAID array they will show up as only one logical drive.

**Landiin** · #9 10-18-2008, 03:18 PM

Your logical drives show up top represented as volumes. The Desk0 desk1 are real drives connected to the main board.

Drives set up in RAID indeed my show up as one drive. I don't use RAID 0 because the loss of one drive will result in the loss of all data so the reward isn't worth the risk to me. And unless you run a server you shouldn't be running any thing other then RAID 0 unless you just like mirroring your disks.