boxst

Hello ...

Is it possible to have more than 2 hard drives (And 2 CD drives) attached to my computer?

I'm running out of space, and have a spare 20gb hard drive hanging around...

Thanks,

Steve.

IanW

Yes, you will need to add an additional IDE controller, these are nice and cheap if you dont want to be able to boot off the extra drive.

Ian

CodeKey@Lisan

Each "socket" on the motherboard can handle 2 devices*

Usually each motherboard has 2 of these "sockets" - so to answer you question, you can have 4 devices inside your computer.

You can add more devices by buying an additional "sockets" in the form of an "IDE controller card". This card simply plugs into a vacant PCI slot inside your computer.

*Device = CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, HardDisk, CD Burner, DVD Burner, etc...

Daz34

If you run an hard drive or rom drive off one of these additional IDE controllers, does it slow the devices down?

At the moment I have 2 x HHD master & slave on the Primary IDE channel & a DVDROM & CDRW as master and slave on the secondary IDE channel.

This is not ideal. Would I be advised to get a controller card?

Darren

Hobo_Jojo

i have 3 hdd's in my pc at the moment. just try to keep track of which drive has which drive letter assigned as well as what partitions are on which drive if your using more partitions

mr-white

if your mobo has onboard raid you'll be able to have up to 6 drives but its reccommended to have the same hdds you'll get better performance and its also cheaper than scsi

if u have 2 hdd and 2 rom drives (cd, dvd, cdrw, dvdrw) try to keep your windows hdd on a diff cable to your main rom drive as it'll cain the cables if u reading from the rom drive to the hdd

MW

CodeKey@Lisan

The master and slave arrangement means the 2 devices share the one socket. If both devices are in use at exactly the same time, they're effectively battling it out for use of the socket.

Therefore its best to have a think about which devices are going to be running at exactly the same time and perhaps let them have their own socket, or perhaps share a socket with a device thats not used very much.

In an ideal world you'd have one socket per device (eg. not share one socket with 2 devices)

BaldyMan

get a mother board with raid will give u 1 or 2 extra ide slots - any bigger than that you are looking at silly money.

Foot_Tapper

Steve, buy a new hard drive, 80 Gigs are cheap enough.

Do a drive image , from second (non-system) drive to the new one.
Or just copy the data across.

Pros
No faffing around with buying extra cards.
Less load on your psu
Less space used inside box=better air flow
Less generated heat
sell the extra drives ???

cons
It'll cost wot £60-70, i dunno
repartion the drive to use the full 80 Gigs, or do it with imaging software, and resize partitions at same time.