Hi all,

I'm planning on getting a new hard drive but I'm not sure if I'll have room for it in my PC. I'm not great with hardware so excuse me if I get some info wrong here. At the moment I have 4 IDE drives. 2 CD drives - one master, one slave, a hard drive (master) and a Zip drive (slave). Is it possible for me to connect 3 IDE devices to one cable? If not which I suspect it isn't, how would I get this extra HD into my PC?

I don't think you can do it. The bios is set for the Master/Slave setup and you'd be hard pressed to find ide cables with 3 ide connectors (not counting the one that connects to the motherboard of course).

One option is to get a scsi add-in card for your PC which can handle up to seven devices on one chain. But how are you going to fit 5 hard drives in one case? Almost best to just buy one much larger hard drive and move the data from the current smallest drive to the new big one.

Anyway those are just some ideas from the top of my head.

You definitely cannot have more than two devices on a IDE cable.

You need either a SCSI adapter card and SCSI Drive or an IDE Controller Card and an IDE drive. Either of these Options will plug into the PCI slots on your motherboard. I would recommend the IDE option unless you need SCSI speed and/or lots more drives. The IDE parts are considerably cheaper and you can chop & change which drive is first in the boot sequence.

SATA is also another option. Make sure whichever card you buy that the hard drive is compatible (SCSI, IDE or SATA)

OK, thanks for the info peeps.

Karma, it's not 5 hard drives - just 2. The other 3 devices are a CD writer, DVD drive and Zip drive. I could just trade my hard drive in for a bigger version but my original thoughts on the subject were that it would be sensible to have two hard drives - one for programs, one for data. Gives that extra level from drive failure (although it's not as if that ever happens).

I think I'll probably get a SATA drive. I believe my motherboard has two SATA ports.

I would consider dumping the ZIP drive or see if you can use it externally. Zips were great in their day, but have largely been supplanted by CD burners. Zip carts are much more expensive then CD disks.

Copy anything you have on ZIP to CD/Rs or RWs, and replace the ZIP with another hard drive.

Another thing to consider is an external hard drive. You can get 100G externals for under $100. An USB 2.0 external will give you very good performance and give you the added advantage of being able to easily connect it to multiple PCs.

Another possibility is an external drive cabinet. For about $40. You can get a case for a internal hard drive that can connect to a USB port.

Cheers for the input Scott. Ditching the zip drive has crossed my mind. I made this PC while I was at university. I added a zip drive as all the PC's at my uni had zip drives but very few had CD writers. But since I've graduated, I've not used it once. Guess it's time to look on Ebay to see how much it'll fetch :)