How Many IDE Drives Can I Have? - Tech Support Forums

PeterGriffin · June 21st, 2003, 11:09 AM

I know that I have have four devices with the two IDE controllers (primary and secondary) that are on the mobo, but I want more. Can I install a PCI IDE controller card and add another four devices? Or can a computer only handle four no matter what and if I wanted more devices I have to use SCSI? I don't wanna use SCSI though because they cost to much.

Thanks

tmx468 · June 21st, 2003, 11:18 AM

If you add another controller card, you can indeed add more drives - one question though. Just how much space do you need??

billniceguy · June 21st, 2003, 02:52 PM

I once had a mom with the two usual ide controller slots, but also had two of the ultra-blue slots, so could have 7 hd plus cd...but why need it now, with 120 gig hds and more.
If u have a bunch of hds u want to to put on one hd, then use FX and copy what u want...or copy whole hd to hd with Ghost. Or put one hd as slave to your big hd, wplit the screen, drag whatever folders u want from slave to master.
If u use fx, u need the floppy program, and special belken cable.

meese · June 21st, 2003, 03:28 PM

There are a couple of reasons why adding an IDE controller to your system is advantageous.

1) You have 3 hard drives with a different OS on each one. You can make each one a master on its own IDE controller.

2) You have a server. You have a setup where the Primary IDE controller on your motherboard holds your boot drive as the Master, and a mirror of this drive is the slave. These drives are no more than 20GB. They only hold the OS and Programs. You have a CD rom as the Master on the secondary IDE controller on the motherboard. Then on the PCI IDE contoller you have 2 larger (60gb) drives. Your data is stored on these drives. One is a exact duplicate of the other. You have each of these drives set as masters on each of the ide controllers on the pci card.

3) For some reason you have 4 internal optical devices and 4 hardrives.

If you are concerned about your data, its always better to keep it separate from your OS and programs. You can do this with two partitions on one drive but if the drive dies, so does your data. A better way is to have a drive without any os. Its only used for data. This way, if you have to, you can move it easily to another system. Also these 120Gb drives are great on motherboards that support them. If you need to move a drive like that to an older system you may be screwed if the BIOS won't recognize the drive.