How many HDD on one IDE

edwardaune · Apr 30, 2005

How many HDD's can you hook up to one ide connection on the mobo. Reason being, a buddy of mine just bought a 120G and he already had a 60 and a 40 in his system before that. The 40 was the Windows drive and the 60 had all of his music. Well, like I said he just purchased the 120 and wants to use the 60 along with it. This may be a stupid question but do they make an IDE cable the will connect three or more HDD's to one channel? That way he can just add the 120 to mix and have that much more storage. What do you guys think? Obviously if he formats the 60 for the OS he then loses all of his music. He wants to get the most storage potential as possible.

Prodigious · Apr 30, 2005

I think its a horribly bad idea. I think there are 3 drive ide cables(but I'm not sure). However, 2 hdds on a single channel is bad, let alone 3. Thats just asking for trouble(note: the performance will be unneccesarily bad).

Kendan · Apr 30, 2005

Only two per IDE cable which means 4 devices on most motherboards. He can add an IDE PCI card to add more. He could also get a usb2/firewire external case to put it in.

Super Nade · Apr 30, 2005

Hiya Ed !

He could add the 120Gb HDD to the channel his optical drive is on. That would solve a few problems. I have not tried to add more than 2 HDD's to the same channel.

An important point to note is that, with 2 IDE's on one channel, the channel can only deal with 1 request at a time. So if you have 2 HDD's on one channel, the second one will wait for the request submitted by the first one (or vice versa) to be processed, before its concerns are addressed

So, *I think* you can put 3 drives but the performance penalty would be quite heavy and apparent. Its easier to use an add on controller card to provide for extra channels.

Where are you, mate? Hope all's well :beer:

Mr.Guvernment · Apr 30, 2005

as well u would have to make your own 3 connector IDE cable anyways - also i dont think it would work because the bios would not know to pick up a 3rd drive.

edwardaune · Apr 30, 2005

Thanks guys, I thought I would pop on the forum to get opinions and a little info, and as always you guys came through. I will pass on the info and thanks again. Whats happenin Nade.

Flewdefur · Apr 30, 2005

to clarify.

A MAXIMUM of TWO devices can be on an IDE channel. you CANNOT run 3 (or more) devices on an ide channel. Just because there are "IDE"-looking cables with 3 channels does not mean they are ment for the computer.

Most motherboards have 2 IDE channels, so you could do any configuration/number of 4 devices including cdrom drives and hard drives. For more IDE you must buy an addon "raid" type card, or use a IDE->USB adapter.

Kendan · Apr 30, 2005

Flewdefur said:
... For more IDE you must buy an addon "raid" type card,...

This is wrong.
It does not have to be a RAID card although I am unclear what you mean by RAID like card :shrug:

. They make IDE and SATA PCI cards for this purpose.

Flewdefur · Apr 30, 2005

yes it does not have to support any raid levels, I said "raid" type in quotes because I didnt know what you would call a pci card which supports IDE disks in JABOD only. I guess PCI IDE controller card would be a better term...

Kendan · Apr 30, 2005

Flewdefur said:
yes it does not have to support any raid levels, I said "raid" type in quotes because I didnt know what you would call a pci card which supports IDE disks in JABOD only. I guess PCI IDE controller card would be a better term...

I was just trying to clarify so he did not go out and spend more than what he needs to

ludeboy12 · Apr 30, 2005

i've never noticed any performance loss by having 2 HDDs per ide cable....

i was running six at once....all seemed to perform equally well...was overkilll though so i got rid of some....

on a side note....is there a way to use an ata HDD with a sata connection on the mobo or no??

id kinda like to eliminate the need for my ata/pci card

meionm · Apr 30, 2005

ludeboy12 said:
i've never noticed any performance loss by having 2 HDDs per ide cable....

i was running six at once....all seemed to perform equally well...was overkilll though so i got rid of some....

on a side note....is there a way to use an ata HDD with a sata connection on the mobo or no??

id kinda like to eliminate the need for my ata/pci card

you can buy adapter that converts ata to sata

most sata mobo have atleast one ata connector, or two

JimmyG · Apr 30, 2005

Motherboards with IDE RAID controllers, like the ASUS a7v333 deluxe allow a total of 8 ide drives to be used at once. I have used one ide channel for CD-ROM and a DVD. The second channel for two ide hard drives, and the RAID controller for 2 more ide drives. That works OK but takes a long time to boot up because the RAID controller keeps searching for ide drives until it times out. I have also configured that same mobo to use 4 ide drives on the RAID controller and used the standard ide channels just for optical drives. That works much better because the RAID controller finds the ide drives very fast when there is a full compliment of drives connected to it.

edwardaune · Apr 30, 2005

Kendan said:
I was just trying to clarify so he did not go out and spend more than what he needs to

I wasnt soing to spend anything

just checkin for a friend. Im RAID all of the way.

Kendan · Apr 30, 2005

edwardaune said:
I wasnt soing to spend anything just checkin for a friend. Im RAID all of the way.

I meant your friend spending too much

How many HDD on one IDE

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