adding a 3rd hd.... (1 Viewer)

[Ted Lee]

hi all -

i already have a master & slave hd on my primary eide (?) channel. my secondary eide has a dvd and cd burner.

what i want to do, if possible, is add my 3rd hd to my primary channel (the one with the two hd's already).

is this possible? if so, how? and what issues (if any) are there in doing this?

thx!

 

[Al.Anderson]

No, I don't believe it's possible. (Though I admit I'm not current on any IDE extensions past "E".) But it's not too hard to add another IDE controller and get two more slots. If you need to do this kind of thing in the future you could consider starting with a SCSI drive/controller.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Easiest way Ted is to add a PCI IDE controller such as those sold by Promise. You can then add another four drives to the system and you can boot off any of them.

In my own experience of them, they're great for HDs but plugging a CD/DVD drive on them is prone to odd problems, not least of which is losing the ability to boot of a CD. Odd. I keep the optical drives on the motherboard IDE ports and the HDs on the Promise. Works great.

 

[Ted Lee]

thx all. rob - i assume you mean something like this?

http://www.promise.com/product/produ...product_id=11#

so once i install this, i should be able to add up to two more hd's -- separate from the two i already have...correct?

 

[Jassen M. West]

Are there any SATA connections on your motherboard?

 

[Ted Lee]

unfortunately, no. it's an older (couple of years?) asus board.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Yep, I've got one each of those in both my main systems. You can add four drives to each Promise controller (2 master, 2 slave) in addition to what you have fitted to the motherboard controllers.

 

[Ted Lee]

coolio...thx again!

 

[Keith Paynter]

Just make sure your power supply can handle the additional load. Most can - I have 3 internal optical, 2 internal HD and 1 FW drive, ATI AIW + USB remote, USB mixer and FW video running all the time, plus all the other usual crap, and I'm ok.

My internal HDs are both running on the PCI IDE masters, and no slaves are connected. The Motherboard IDEs run the optical drives.

 

[Parker Clack]

Ted:

Have you thought about getting an external drive? Do you have a Firewire connection or USB 2.0? What are you wanting the extra for, extra storage or are you going to be running an OS off it?

Just something else to consider.

Parker

 

[Ted Lee]

keith, i'm running an antec 450w supply, so i think i'll be okay there.

parker, i already have an external usb drive that i use for backup purposes. i just had an extra drive laying around and thought it'd be good for extra storage or goofing around with.

 

[Jeff Blair]

Rob is right about how to hook them up. I have a PCI IDE controler, and it workes fine. But, don't put a CD drive on it if you ever want to boot off of it. It finds the drives after the BIOS check, so it dosn't see the CD rom as a device until it is too late to boot off of it. If you want to try out differnt OS's then you could get a removable caddy. You hook up your HDD into that, and just slide in and out what OS you want to boot up in. Just another thought.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Keep an eye on the CompUSA web site. They sell no-name USB 2.0 external cases that will let you turn any spare IDE drive into an external device. The normal price is around $50 or $60 bucks, but I've seen them on sale for around $25 (at which point I bought two of them. ) I used of one them to salvage an old drive that I happened to have lying around, and I used the second case to take advantage of a great sale on a 120 GB internal hard drive and get an external out of it for way less than a comparable external drive would cost even on sale - including the cost of the external case.

The whole thing was a lot less of a hassle than popping the case and screwing around with ribbon cables, cards and power connecters.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Steve Berger]

Computergate has a wide selection ranging from $16 - $200 in their "cases" section. I just picked up a couple for $27 ea. USB , Firewire , Combo , SCSI , Encrypted , etc are available.