Installing a third ide harddrive
 

I have a problem, I want to connect a third harddrive to my computer but all the connection slots are taken. I already have two drives, one cdrw and one dvdplayer and now i want to insert a third drive. Is there any way to do this?

You can get a PCI IDE controller card. Something along these lines

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...104-214&depa=0

I'm not sure if that will let you do single drives or only RAID configurations, but there are other cards out there.

Alternatively, if your motherboard has a RAID controller, you could set up a RAID array as a "third" drive.

IDE controllers can only handle 2 devices per controller. Since you're full, do what MooseMan recommends and get a PCI IDE controller card, or maybe a SATA controller because of smaller cables.

The PCI IDE controller cards work very well. My brother has 5 hard drives and a CD-ROM all running in IDE currently. They can be bought for $15-$30.

-Lasereth

I would suggest sata instead of ide if you have the option (ie you haven't already got the HD), it is a much nicer install and is oh so much better when transfering large amounts of data.

Ditto on the IDE controller. It works the same as your onboard controller, but has it's own bios (which might also solve any problems with harddisk sizes on olde motherboards). This means you can add four devices (HDD or CD-R-like). You could even add more than one of these cards if you want to.

As for SATA: no real preference here.

SATA drives transfer data at the same rate that IDE hard drives do. The only way an SATA drive can be faster is if they're in a RAID, and even then, the performance increase is marginal.

-Lasereth

Well... theoretically, you'd get a *slight* increase in speed from the harddisk's buffer. :)

Now, if you want a *real* speed increase, get a newer "native SATA" harddisk, not an older one with a simple IDE-to-SATA translation chip. If you have a native SATA disk, with native command queuing (=more efficient transfers), you'll get really fast indeed. The new 250+ gig maxtors with 16mb buffer are supposed to be bloody fast because of that (and the memory).

Oh yeah, I meant that SATA isn't faster concerning the actual transfer rate. The buffer sizes and RPMs are increased so there is an increase in speed, but not due to the SATA format.

-Lasereth

Thanx a lot for the help. I got an IDE controller and it works like a charm. I love happy endings :D

Are there any of those 250 Sata Drives on rebate yet at the usual Fry's/Circuit City/Best Buy or wherever? I've been buying up 120 and 200 gig drives for 50-60 bucks for a while now (just got my 60 dollar rebate--6 months late, but whatever). I'm ready to move to some real storage, since one of my boxes only has 4 40 gig drives and I had to disconnect the CD drive in order to have enough ide spots on that crappy free ECS motherboard.