Hard drives

[bats21]

Can I put three individual hard drives into one computer?

 

[edfair]

You can put hard drives into a computer to the limits of the OS, the controllers, and the power supplies.
Most current motherboards using IDE controllers are limited to 4 devices on 2 channels of the built-in adapter.
You can add another adapter to increase this to 8 devices, a mix of hard drives, zip drives, cd-roms, and dvds.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[bats21]

can I take out my CD rom and add a hard drive? two hard drives on one IDE controller and one hard drive and cd-RW on the other. Using XP-pro. Thanks

 

[micker377]

Yes, just make sure your BIOS setup drive selection is set to "auto", so it will recognize the change.

 

[garebo]

Also, some hard drives like western digital have different settings for if you have another western digital drive on the same ide cable or if there is a hard drive from a different mfgr on the same ide cable. So you have to go to the hard drive mfgr websites and download the info on each hard drive you have and set the jumpers accordingly.
Another way would be to leave the setup the way you have it now and just add a pci hard drive controller (usually called maxtor or promise but any will do. If your hard drives are newer then you will want to get a pci controller that handles 100\133 instead of only 33 or 66.
If you go that way and add the new controller card then you can just attach your newest hard drive to it and away you go. You may have to format the hard drive of course.
But this is good as you dont have to mess with changing your other hard drives.


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