adding a third hard drive


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hay, i just wanted to know how i would go about adding another hard drive, i have 2 connected at the moment, but no more spots, would i need another ide cable with 4 spots on it, or what? also, whats the best RAID to use and how would i get started using that? thanks, ladr

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Originally posted by drewster2100

hay, i just wanted to know how i would go about adding another hard drive, i have 2 connected at the moment, but no more spots, would i need another ide cable with 4 spots on it, or what? also, whats the best RAID to use and how would i get started using that? thanks, ladr

yes to the second cable for another drive, as for raid theres lotsa info at promise.com

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Originally posted by LaraBoft

I won't recommend attaching a 3th drive to a ide cable. It will blow your harddisk.......

well how else would i add another?

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Get a cheap PCI ATA133 RAID card and you'll have another 4 drive options (also supports big 160MB drives), mind you I suspect you're going to be running out of power supply leads before you've filled a monster case with drives.

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Originally posted by LaraBoft

I won't recommend attaching a 3th drive to a ide cable. It will blow your harddisk.......

3th??? I have only heard of 3rd the last time I checked...
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Originally posted by paulladle

Get a cheap PCI ATA133 RAID card and you'll have another 4 drive options (also supports big 160MB drives), mind you I suspect you're going to be running out of power supply leads before you've filled a monster case with drives.

would those drives be slower than the ones going through ide? and i have a 300 watt power supply, so i would be fine

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EIO AP1680 PCI ATA133 RAID (RAID 0 1) Controller Card W/Cable - Retail Box ?19.98 ?23.48 inc VAT QuickFind code: 33743

Mfr part #: AP1680

Product Information

Support IDE RAID 0 (Striped set), RAID 1(Mirrored set) and RAID 0+1 (Striped+Mirror) under MicrosoftR Windows OS

System Boot up from standard and RAID Volume supported

Support ULTRA ATA133 / 100 IDE Hard Disk Drive

Coexist with on-board IDE controller

Dual Independent IDE channels connect up to Maximum 4 IDE devices

Maximum IDE data transfer rate up to 133Mbyte / Second

Support up to 137GB Big drive with LBA addressing

On-Board Upgradeable Flash BIOS support

Easy RAID Configuration with DOS Boot up menu

Support PIO, DMA and Ultra DMA modes

PCI Local bus Revision 2.2 compliant

32-bit PCI Bus Master support

Fully PCI Plug and Play

Told you they were cheap but admittedly this one only says it supports drives up to 137GB, I seem to remember the Maxtor 160GB drive comes with an AT133 controller card as most pre-ATA133 BIOS have a size limitation.

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Hey heres the description for what I imagine is a card you need to get more IDE spaces

AT100 Controller Card, adds 4 x AT100 IDE Ports

Is that what I would need if I wanted to add more IDE to my machine?

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Depends on what you want to do - Mirrored gives you more security at the cost of space (as stuff is duplicated over the drives) and striped gives you the ability to have your drives appear as one enormous volume. Personally I've got my CD drives on a very cheap old ATA66 card (non-RAID) which lets me run all my drives as master on their own channel.

And yes that AT100 Controller Card would give you an extra 4 IDE channels Osiris however like I said before your PSU needs to be man enough for the job (probably 400W) and have enough spare connectors.

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Thanks mate

Yes its a 400W

doesnt really have any spare power connectors

but you can buy splitters cant you, which will give me addition power connectors if im not mistaking.

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