IDE Expansion PCI Cards

martindtanderson · Fri 17 Sep, 2004 10.19

Can anyone suggest a good cheap IDE Expansion PCI card (not sure of the techy term), so I can have 2 Optical Drives and 3 HDDs?

My Motherboard only has 2 IDE slots...

Also does anyone know any websites that provides guides and support for installing these cards and a 3rd HDD?

cwathen · Fri 17 Sep, 2004 16.25

Yeah I have to agree, with the relatively low cost of EIDE hard drives these days (and of course the peanuts that it now costs to archive material you don't need all the time to CDR), I can't see much justification for having 3 hard drives. You'd be better off swapping one of them out (or even both of them) for a new, high capacity drive rather than shell out for an IDE card and another hard drive.

If you absolutely must have a 3rd hard drive, I'd recommend getting a new motherboard - even mid range motherboards frequently have 4 IDE channels these days. Alternatively, if access time isn't that important, perhaps consider an external USB2 drive? (only if you have USB2 though, USB1.1 is too slow).

martindtanderson · Fri 17 Sep, 2004 22.32

When I built my machine I already had my 3rd Hard Drive. I have left that in an old PC Case, and was wondering how easy it may be to add it to my 2 other HDDs

SteveL · Fri 17 Sep, 2004 23.24

They're Called IDE RAID controllers. There's One here, Or you could Try eBay If you want To pay Less.

cwathen · Sat 18 Sep, 2004 09.36

They're Called IDE RAID controllers. There's One here, Or you could Try eBay If you want To pay Less.

You only need a RAID controller if you want to run a RAID system (many motherboards have built in support for RAID anyway). If you just want to run several hard drives you only need a PCI EIDE controller.

Neil Jones · Sat 18 Sep, 2004 11.03

cwathen wrote:
They're Called IDE RAID controllers. There's One here, Or you could Try eBay If you want To pay Less.
You only need a RAID controller if you want to run a RAID system (many motherboards have built in support for RAID anyway). If you just want to run several hard drives you only need a PCI EIDE controller.

SATA, assuming the OP has appropriate connectors and a recent enough motherboard, could be another option, although these things aren't supported on WinXP out of the box (at least not if you want to install the OS on them).

shaun · Thu 23 Sep, 2004 18.17

cwathen wrote:
They're Called IDE RAID controllers. There's One here, Or you could Try eBay If you want To pay Less.
You only need a RAID controller if you want to run a RAID system (many motherboards have built in support for RAID anyway). If you just want to run several hard drives you only need a PCI EIDE controller.

*AHEM*

Just about every PCI IDE card produced in the last 500 years has some kind of RAID support, thus called "IDE RAID" cards.

(299 days to broadband - w00t!)
(OMG 15th post)

Big Brother · Fri 24 Sep, 2004 22.23

http://www.dabs.com will have something like this. It will probably come with instructions... even if it doesn't the manufacturers site will have it.

You only get "problems" installing new hardware if you don't follow the instructions. Skipping one step or doing it your own way does give you problems. Items like this are very fussy on their installation. So beware.

Edit: Why not invest in a USB hard drive and transfer the data to it, it would probably work out slightly cheaper... I haven't checked so don't quote me on it.