Connect another hard Drive.

[Edward]

Is it possible to connect another HD to my system without disconnecting my current HD and CD drive? My system board olny has 2 IDE slots. I know that you can get cables that will fit into two IDE devices and the motherboard. How does a setup like this work?

[Edward]

PS I dont want to buy extra hardware besides a cable. And yes my PSU has the connections to support another device.

[Dave]

Each IDE bus has two channels, so you should quite easily be able to put 2 hard drives and a CD-ROM drive onto two IDE buses. Pretty much every IDE cable you buy will have one connector at one end, and two at the other. You might need to change some jumpers (one device has to be a master device, the other a slave).

 

My setup is pretty good; I have two CD-ROM drives running off of one bus and two hard drives running off of another, plus another two hard drives running off of a Serial ATA bus

[Spyman]

Yes it is possible by only changing the cable.

 

I have 3 HDs and 1 CD connected to my motherboard with 2 IDE slots.

 

The IDE port should normally support 2 devices, one Master and one Slave.

Thus 2 ports allows for 4 devices, slot 1: Master and Slave and slot 2: Master and slave.

 

Only thing needed is a cable that splits two ways thus having three contacts.

Also somewhere on the back of the devices near the contact are a set of dip-switches which must be changed to make one of the devices slave. Normally dipped Master from factory.

Different setup of the dips on different devices but usually there is a description on which dip is which, also somewhere back, on the device.

 

Note: Some devices don't work with eatch other and depending on motherboard and OS there might also be problems. I had to try several combinations before I even got the hardware to recognize all my devices and then go through a lot of Windows issues.

[5614]

As said, IDE cables have 3 ports on them.

 

One to the motherboard's IDE

One to a HDD

and a second to a second HDD (the 2nd is normally found 1/2 way up the cable)

 

And remember to set the jumpers on the HDD the right way around, the HDD where you OS is the primary or master drive, the other is the secondary or slave.

[Edward]

What are the liumititaions of the "slave" drive? Will my CD (Not CD rw ) drive work as normal if it were a slave?

[Dave]

Yeah, it'll work fine.

[Edward]

Ok thankyou everyone for your help and advice.

[Spyman]

What are the liumititaions of the "slave" drive? Will my CD (Not CD rw ) drive work as normal if it were a slave?

There will be limitations in the access time !

 

If one device is "single" on the port then the port uses the maximum transfer speed for that device, if there are Two devices then the transfer speed must be ruled by the slowest device.

(If the slow unit goes to stanby, due to not accessed in a long time, the speed will go up on the fast one.)

 

Also when the CPU access both devices at the same time they have to share the only cable and take turns in communicating with the motherbord, thus upload time for a file will double for eatch unit in this case.

 

With the speed of the modern computers and devices nowdays a don't know if You would notice the difference.

[JohnB]

The only thing I can add is that perhaps it is best to have your OS HDD as the Master on IDE 0 with your CD-ROM as slave. Your second HDD would be Master on IDE 1. This means that if you get a CD-RW it would be slave on IDE1.

 

I've found that there is much better performance (especially for copying CDs) if the two CD drives are on different IDEs. It also means you only have to worry about the jumper settings on the CD-ROMs.