Good Afternoon Everyone,

I own a one-year-old Dell Dimension desktop that came with a
factory-installed 9.1 GB Maxtor 7,200rpm hard drive (Model #90913D4).

Recently I purchased a 10 GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Diamond Max Plus High
Performance EIDE hard drive kit (Kit #ST0151000U; Serial #K204J5JC) with the
intention of adding a second hard drive to my system.

Question No. 1:
Which of these two hard drives is the highest performance unit?  I'd like to
utilize the best performer as my primary master drive, assuming it's
advisable to do so.

Question No. 2:
What is thes best way for me to use the second drive?  Do I set it up as a
slave to the primary master or do I employ it in some other arrangement?

My main reason for purchasing the second hard drive is to use it to back up
my primary hard drive in the unlikely event the primary drive should fail or
in the (more likely) scenario that the information stored on the primary
drive should somehow become corrupted to the extent that a clean wipe,
partition and format of the drive is required.

I currently multi-boot four different operating systems from my
Dell-installed Maxtor drive using PartitonMagic and BootMagic from
PowerQuest (Windows 98, Windows 2ooo, Red Hat Linux 6.1 and BeOS 5.0).

For those of you who are wondering (of perhaps prefer another hard drive
manufacturer), I purchased a Maxtor because the factory-installed Maxtor
unit hasn't given me any probelms *and* the price was right.

I'm no neophtye to computers and software, but I am new to using mutiple
hard drives in a desktop system.  Any information and advice you can offer
(including links to related primer websites) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jeffrey Ottie
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