Harddrive Hook-up???

[smiz]

I currently have 2 ATA100 WD Harddrives plus a CDR/W as well as a DVD burner hooked-up to my IDE1 and IDE2 connectors on my MB. Now I need to add a third harddrive (to use just for data) what are my options to hooking it up since I am out of IDE slots??????

Thanks

 

[JackFrost]

Well, you can either:

1) get a pci card that allows for IDE connections. Both WD and Maxtor ship these cards with their high capacity drives.

2) buy an external USB case to house your extra HD in.

 

[davemar14]

The easiest way would to be to buy a PCI IDE card. They are around $ 30 or so. If you buy a high capacity drive, like over 120 GB, the manufacturers usually ship a free card with them.

 

[jgutz20]

usb drives are very nice, although more expensive, because you can easily hook it up to another computer. if the 3rd hard drive is already bought, you can buy external usb cases to mount it in.

 

[grafixmonkey]

Since you seem to be collecting a large amount of information, it might be a good idea to get a RAID card and start using a redundant backup system as your "just for data" drive. Having that system myself saved me from losing a bunch of important data when a brand new maxtor drive failed after two months. A RAID card will also let you add plain old single hard drives to it, and use them like a normal drive (at least I think they will) so getting a raid card with extra slots gives you the capability of redundancy if you want it later, and also gives you extra IDE channels for your other drives. They also remove the problems windows has with large hard drives, since they handle drive access themselves, and I think they reduce the CPU usage during hard drive access too.

That's in addition to their ability to make your hard drive transfer rate much faster, but doing that probably requires more hardware than you want to buy right now, unless your other two drives are the same size and same amount of cache.