Adding an Ultra ATA drive
 

Currently I have two IDE drives in my system. My MB supports SATA and such, my case still has room for another drive or two.

Tigerdirect has some good deals (after rebate) now on Ultra ATA drives, for example, 160GB for $49.99.

Has anyone added just one ATA drive in their system with IDE drives like mine?

It all depends on your motherboard. Keep in mind Ultra ATA is the same thing as IDE. Nobody makes "IDE" drives any more; they're all Ultra ATA, but they use the same connections, so everybody still calls them IDE. Sometimes they call them "IDE Ultra ATA," which is redundant... but who am I to tell them that?

Do you have room for another "IDE" drive? If you have two HDDs and two optical drives, chances are you have no more room. Unless you buy an add in PCI IDE controller, there's nowhere to connect a new drive.

If you DO have space, however, there shouldn't be a problem. You already have two drives as JBOD, so adding a third shouldn't change a thing.

And remember... IDE, ATA... same thing. SATA is the new(er) one, not ATA.

to add to the post above ..

sometimes the old-skool non-sata drives are called pata drives.
(serial ata and parallel ata).

and, yes, as long as your mobo has a primary and secondary ide, you can connect up to 4 pata (ide/uata) dirves. have a look, because i've seen a few boards that have only a primary (and then a couple sata conn's).

put the hdd's on primary connector and the opticals on secondary.

:)

//edit - when you add this new hdd if you get one, check the jumpers! the hdd you have now is probably fine, but look at it anyways (i've seen drives with a master/single setting and a master/with slave setting).
primary master is your sys disk. the new one should be jumpered to slave. unless you plan on reinstalling your os and using the new hdd as your sys disk.

Naughty SiN :) any drives installed these days should be set to Cable Select on their jumpers to avoid conflicts in the addressing. . . unless of course the drive or the motherboard is too old to support it properly.

well, that's a new one.

care to back that up? :)

(I used to build pc's at work, and we never used csel).

(a quick google tells me it's just about 'ease' .. nothing a bout addressing. that's what I want details on).

I don't dare use cable select. I always use master/slave on Ultra ATA drives. I figure I'm smarter than the OS and dammit, it ought to do what I tell it.

On my system at least, I use master/slave when there is more than one device on the channel, but if there is only one device on the channel, the machine is *very* slow and sometimes unstable if the device is set to anything other than CS.

:lol: totally how i feel too :p

Bahahaha!

Besides that, I've NEVER had a drive that was put on cable select work right. NEVER. Lots of different motherboards, lots of different drives... I keep trying it, just to see if it will work. It doesn't.

One more vote for hardwiring. I've had okay luck with CS on all recent, like branded components, but it's something many techs learned to avoid years ago. Wasted time.

For me, if the customer insists, but it always includes a Free Compatibility Disclaimer.

I think I'll snag that cheap drive first, there is an EIDE/ATA 133 for $50. I have put together some 30 or so PCs over the years. I'm not a fan of cable select, either. Most of the time the drives aren't recognized or recognized correctly.

Thanks for all your 2 pennies.

I would agree with everything posted here, however i would make on suggestion

Put one HD on the primary channel with the optical as the slave and put the second hd on the slave channel.

This will make drive-to-drive copies noticably faster.

IsuGuy, but it will slow down transfers from the optical drive to the hard drives. The theory behind putting the hard drives on the same cable is that the average user copies from the optical drives to the hard drives more often than from HDD to HDD or from optical to optical. If this isn't the case, obviously you'll want to arrange your drives accordingly.

Also, CS is buggy and broken. Never, ever use it unless some other conflict forces you (like in sailor's case).

I think that you are saying that you want to install a SATA drive with the IDE drives you currently have. My mother board supports SATA connections, but I had troubles with it and so installed a Adaptec SATA controller. Flawless. With the prices of drives dropping I will soon have all SATA drives. Good Luck

I thought the primary IDE channel is faster than the sec.
You use the 80-conductor Ultra DMA IDE/ATA interface cable only on the primary, right?

So put the hard drives on the pri. and the slower optical drives on the sec.

No, you use exactly the same cables on primary and secondary IDE channels. You use a different cable on the floppy channel, which is totally different anyway. Both IDE channels should be the same speed.

There was a time when primary/secondary cables were often different. Back when ultra ATA 33+MB/s was new, people still used the older 40-wire cables for the CD on the secondary channel. Didn't matter with CD speeds. It's unusual these days, and annoying. Not having pin 34 grounded (as with an 80wire cable) means modes 3 or better can't work on that channel. The drives will work, but they'll never go faster than mode 2.

On some early Ultra boards that didn't always provide UltraDMA on both channels, 40wire cables are fine for the slow channel. Won't make a difference. Of course, if you're still running one of these boards you probably aren't too concerned about speed.

I yank the things whenever I find them.

Thank you cyrnel. I'm glad you are around here!
I don't have money and have not updated my computers for about two/three years.
So, IDE channels are the same speed now.

What an age we live in.