What is a slave drive?

Question

I am wanting to backup all of my computer files at all times, and I heard that you can get a second hard drive, set it to "slave" mode, and it will maintain an exact copy of my main drive. Is this true? If so, how hard is this to do and will the slave drive always keep an exact copy at all times?

Answer 1

Hard drives connect to the computer using a connection called "IDE". This connection allows for two hard drives per connector. The main drive is called the master drive and it is the drive your operating systems runs off of.



The second drive is called the slave drive. Your computer can't start off of this drive, but it can use it for storing information.



Normally, you need to tell the computer which drive is the primary drive (master) and which is the secondary (slave). That is what they mean by setting the drive as a slave.



It is straightforward to set up a second drive as a slave drive and configure your computer to use it, but you do need some knowledge to do it. There are a lot of resources on how to do this, but if you don't feel confident about doing it, a local computer shop should be able to help you purchase the new drive and then install it for you for a very fair price.



Your data will not automatically synchronize to the new drive. You will need to either manually back up your data or set up some software to do it for you automatically (preferred). The computer shop should be able help you select an appropriate software package and help you configure it.



There is another option, configuring your system for RAID 1 or mirroring. This would make an exact, essentially invisible, copy of your main drive. You would not be able to use the second drive for anything else and it is significantly more complex to configure and restore from this configuration. You can look for more information about this online, but its probably overkill for your situation, both in terms of function and complexity.



Good luck!

Answer 2

Hi, Slaving a hard drive or CD/Rom drive is the old school way of saying that you are going to connect a drive under another. An example of this would be using an IDE ribbon cable connecting the first connector to a "primary" drive then the second connector to the "secondary or slave" drive. Often there are jumper settings that must be set correctly on the drives. Slaving is useful for adding secondary storage space or organization purposes. Most common interface used for slaving is IDE.



This is old school technology, in the new Sata Drivers, this is not necessary. If you put your model pc, I'll help you better.

Good Bye!

Answer 3

A slave drive is like an extra storage device. It doesn't usually contain system files, as this would confuse the computer when it boots up. You might manage to do a system back-up onto this slave drive. But only one of your hard drives can be the one that boots up and interfaces with all your hardware and system files.

Answer 4

Not a good idea. Unless you have a very old machine there is no longer a master or slave drive. But a backup onto the same machine will get lost if the machine gets a virus which destroys data, it will destroy both copies. Also a serious power problem on the motherboard could destroy both drives.

Answer 5

Slave drive simply means to install a second internal or external drive and use it to create a system image. Acronis will do so at automatic intervals.





However remember to malware and virus clean and defragment your computer so your not backing up a garbage infested computer.



Simply installing a second harddrive as a slave won't make it automatically do the incremental backup.