the new computer has the room for the two harddrives but should i hook them up or will it mess up the machine.
Adding the old hard drives to the new machine will not cause a problem. I personally run 3 separate hard drives in my current machine, one for the OS, one for data and one for a backup.
what would happen if i hooked them up while windows was running would i be able to recover my music and pictures from the harddrives. and which hardrive would have my pics and music on it or will i have to find out.
Well, you obviously don't want to do it while the machine is turned on.
As for which hard drive has the data, you would just have to poke around in there to find out.
and i only heard noise from one hard drive when it was making noise is this normal.
That depends. Some hard drives are louder than others, but typically if they are the same brand / model and the same age, one should not be significantly louder than the other, but it is possible.
I heard these twin drives work in sync with eachother is there something special that has to be done to recover my info.
That depends on how they were set up. There are different ways to configure a multiple hard drive system. I use them as separate disks, so my machine sees them individually. They can also be arranged in a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) fashion which means the OS sees them as one drive. So your 2 x 250GB drives would seen by the PC as one 500GB hard drive.
Then you move into things like RAID 0, 1, 5, etc. This is where things get tricky. Most users opt for RAID 0 or 1. RAID 0 writes half of the data to one drive and half of the data to the other drive which significantly increases read and write operations to the drives. The downfall is that if one drive fails, you lose all your data because only half is written to the second drive. RAID 1 provides redundancy by mirroring both of the drives, meaning the same data is written to both drives. There is no performance increase with this configuration, but if one of the drives fail, no data is lost.
If your system is RAID 0, you may have some problems. I've never attempted to recover data from a RAID 1 array using a different machine, so someone else will have to help out with that aspect.
Edited by Spyderturbo007, 30 December 2009 - 08:20 AM.