Fitting third and subsequent hard drives

milltown

Both of the standard IDE cables on my mobo are full, 20gig + 80gig on one, DVD + CDRW on t'other.
Are there mobos available with more than two IDE channels without getting into the realms of specialised kit or is two the industry standard?
Otherwise I know I need an IDE controller PCI card. Extra storage is all I'm after really and I'm impressed with the performance of my WD 80gig w/8MB cache so far. Will a drive running off an extra controller be noticably slower than running direct from the mobo?
What is the difference between IDE, ATA and serial ATA and do I need to worry about it? That is, are they compatible with each other or completely seperate standards?
From limited (by my own ignorance) browsing on Ebay it seems IDE controller cards are much cheaper there than in any shops or websites on this side of the water. Is there anything I need to watch for if buying off Ebay, like outdated, slower stuff being flogged off because it couldn't be sold in shops anymore?

All advice much appreciated, thanks.

Yavvy

First of all I would never put more than 2 decivies on an IDE bus and I would never put my primary harddrive on the same bus as anythign else. Yes Ide contrillers are cheap ...use them.
Or you could get an IDE to SCSI converter/box and put up to 8 devices on a bus.

Im not sure if this was helpful.


Ok About buying off Ebay. Ide stuff will be a lot cheaper for one reason Ebay has a better grip on the actual market than retail does. and IDE stuff is slowly changing to Serial ATA, and SCSI

s if your buying, buy a good brand. check out the brandname on the interweb and make sure ATA100 or ATA 133

milltown

So ATA and Serial ATA are just different flavours of IDE then?

Cake Fiend

ATA is the technically more correct term for IDE.
Next time you upgrade your motherboard, consider looking at boards with on-board RAID controllers - these boards will have 4 IDE controllers in total, giving you a possible 8 ATA devices connected at once.

Kali

ATA is the technically more correct term for IDE.

Not quite.. and just to clear it up:
ATA is the transfer protocol and specification used. EIDE is the hard-drive specification itself.

You don't buy an ATA hard-drive, you buy an EIDE hard-drive that supports ATA

As far as Serial ATA goes, thats a whole new transfer method.. just uses two wires iirc instead of the several dozen on a normal ATA cable.

Capt'n Midnight

See that you are picking up a controller card - if I remember it should have two sockets - so four devices....

IDE speed is lower than SCSI because IDE uses the CPU to transfer the info - on a fast machine this should not be too much of a problem - start the taskmanager and see how CPU time is used during large file copies.

IDE (or what ever you want to call it) Started off as an extension to the BUS - and so used to run at BUS speed (ISA ) - newer controllers run faster 100 / 133 MHz ??

If you think the motherboard has a better controller then move the DVD / CDRW to the new one perhaps as these can be slower devices)
(other options would be to get an external USB adaptor ... - handy for 2.5" drives )

The Way I usually do it is to connect the new drive on it's own to PRI IDE controller, Fdisk and put on a 2GB FAT 16 partition - sys it with Dos or something - restart the computer and make sure it boots from the drive - in case you ever need to use as a master... Then you can put it on other controllers - but with 4 drives you will have lots of letters...

There are some technet articles somewhere about adding in > 3 drives in XP or 2K so you may have fun. - hence the reason to try each new drive on it's own first.

BTW: Marx computers are doing some nice removable drive bays for about €20 - handy if you are swapping in drives...