Installing a 3rd hard drive question

[Petra]

I've taken out the hard drive from my sister's knackered old computer. I'm pretty sure that the problems with her old computer were due to the motherboard, not the drive itself.

I already have 2 dvd drives, and 2 physical hard drives.

Heidi's old drive is an 80 Gb Seagate ATA IV, model ST380021A.

I'd like to pop it into my computer as an additional slave, but I'm not sure if this is possible.

Any clues?


:thankee:

[Kyuss Apollo]

You could always put it inside a firewire or USB enclosure and run it as an external.

[Petra]

Thanks, Kyuss. I don't really have the cashflow to buy casing - I know it's cheap, but cheap is a relative thing :D - so I thought I'd just pop it in.

I might even consider a fourth internal drive at some point, if I can.

The thing is, the IDE cables only have 2 connectors on them, so I wasn't sure what the deal is there. Can I get a cable with 3 or 4 connectors?

My motherboard only has 2 IDE slots, and both are taken.

[viscousmemories]

With two IDE slots you can have two masters and two slaves. Since you have two hard drives and two optical drives right now, that's all you can have.

[Petra]

Bugger.


Oh, well. Thanks for the replies.


Anyone wanna buy an 80gb drive?

[yguy]

I believe you can get a SATA controller on a PCI card, but you still need some way to physically mount the drive in the case. You'd also need a power connection for it.

OTOH, if you go external, you may also need a USB 2.0 or firewire card to accomodate the drive anyway, if your machine lacks those capabilities.

[Petra]

I think that for the money I spend, I'd be best to just save a little extra to buy a decent sized external drive. I have USB 2.0 capabilities, so that won't be a problem. Buying a pci card or external casing just isn't worth it for 80 gb, especially when I don't even know if the drive is damaged or not.

I gave it back to my sister, though, so she can install and test it in her new machine, as she only has 1 HDD and 1 optical at this point.