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  • #2298528

    Installing a third hard drive?

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    by helloiam ·

    I already have two hard drives a DVD-rom drive and a CD-RW drive, how do I also use the third hard drive?

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    • #3482293

      Installing a third hard drive?

      by thechas ·

      In reply to Installing a third hard drive?

      There are several ways.

      Install a PCI IDE controller card.
      That will give you the ability to have up to 4 more drives for around $30.

      Install a SCSI controller and drive. I believe that you can install at least 7 devices on a single SCSI controller.

      Install a USB 2.0, or FireWire card, and use an external drive.

      Install a serial ATA card. This gives you the latest hard drive interface.

      Chas

    • #3510597

      Installing a third hard drive?

      by guruofdos ·

      In reply to Installing a third hard drive?

      See TheChas’s answers…he knows, you know!!

      There are other options!!

      1) Obtain a combined CDRW/DVD drive for about ?40 (US$60) the Artec is very good. This will free up an IDE port.

      2) Replace the smaller hard disks with a larger one and partition it to give you three drive letters.

      I’m assuming you have a third hard drive sculling around that you just want to fit for the hell of it….well, unless you want to spend some money there isn’t really an easy way.

      You CAN purchase relatively cheaply an external case with a built in PSU that will allow fitting of a standard 3.5″ IDE hard disk and give you a USB or parallel port interface. Parallel port versions are slightly cheaper but they are pretty slow so the USB is a better scheme. USB2 is even better if you have USB2 on the computer.

      I have a computer with 8 IDE drives, but it involves a modified ribbon cable and a 5.25 blanking plate with some switches on the front and a small PCB with some LS245 buffer IC’s. Any number of drives can be connected up, but they have to be ‘switched’ in and out before booting. The autodetect IDE option is enabled in the BIOS to allow the selected drives to be recognised on boot up.

      You could even fit a 5.25″ drive caddy to themachine and swap hard disks in and out as required.

      All these methods involve some capital outlay however. If you are looking for a ‘cost-free’ solution then your only option is to hang the ribbon cable and power cable out of the case or leave the case open and ‘cold swap’ drives as and when necessary.

    • #3510559

      Installing a third hard drive?

      by blaine moore ·

      In reply to Installing a third hard drive?

      All good suggestions.

      You could also install it in another machine and map a network drive to your local machine. Performance will not be as good, but it will allow for another disk.

    • #3510416

      Installing a third hard drive?

      by djent ·

      In reply to Installing a third hard drive?

      SCSI is the best long term solution. Up to 16 devices on one controller using one IRQ, concurrent read/write to all devices, fault tolerance, external devices, SCSI over ethernet, serial SCSI to come and maximum IO throughput on all devices. You canalso use multiple controllers or multi channel controllers for more devices. It is the fastest, most flexible interface available. The only downside is price.

    • #3522747

      Installing a third hard drive?

      by walter_loh ·

      In reply to Installing a third hard drive?

      cheapset solution will be buying a pci ide card or raid card .

    • #3356716

      Installing a third hard drive?

      by helloiam ·

      In reply to Installing a third hard drive?

      This question was auto closed due to inactivity

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