Hello All, I am trying to put a 3rd hard drive on my pc, but the strip is made for two hard drives, is this standard for all pc's? if there ia a way to add more hard drive INTERNALLY how would I be able to do? I Do Not want to use EXTERNAL DRIVE. Thank you for your help Jon
Hi Jon, What Motherboard do you have? and what type of HDD do you already have in there and the 3rd one? Are they SATA or IDE?? James
There are cards available that can add ide and sata slots. Right now I'm using one with 2 ide and 2 sata. You might need an adapter too (molex: ide to sata for your hdd power)
Most mobos have two IDE channels. If you have a single optical drive, add it to the other channel. What's your objection to an external drive? They are very handy for backup and data storage
If its a 80 ribbon PATA cable, then sure, you can run 2 drives on the same cable. One drive needs to be set to master and the other to slave (or both to cable select).
Now I have a question, did you actually read the OP's question? Because your answer has almost nothing to do with it. I will say this, "while external drives may have some degree of "handy", IMO, they're not anywhere near as handy as having a volume drive, (or three), right inside the case". This comes much closer; Myself I think I'll wait until "andoyan" condescends to tell us a bit more about this machine other than, "my computer", before I shove my foot in my mouth. You know, are all these drives IDE? Does the board have SATA ports? Does the board have multiple IDE sockets? Since it seems we're dealing with legacy HDDs, some legacy boards have 2 IDE sockets. (Admittedly, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away).
Good evening Captain Cranky. Perhaps you'll enlighten me a bit further as I don't understand your response. Be gentle with me as I'm old and tired. I'm retiring for the night, so I'll add this. If his HDs are on a ribbon cable, it's pretty likely his optical drives are as well. It would be quite strange to have SATA capability and not use it for the HD. Not impossible, but strange. I appreciate your opinion on external drives, but I imagine most people would find an external drive far more "handy" than an internal drive. Easier to connect, portable, easier to replace. I guess I've answered my own question. You come by your sobriquet quite honestly and are promoting your management services.
I tend to fit that description myself. There really isn't enough information in the original post to make, a creditable response. However, the OP says, "I want to put a >> 3rd << HDD in my system". Since SATA became widely available, there is generally only one IDE socket on the board. This is exemplified by my oldest computer, with an Intel 915GAG board, which is pushing 6 years old. It has 4 SATA ports, 1 IDE buss (2 devices), and a floppy connector. I'm sort of clueless as to when the optical drive part of the discussion became pertinent, and why we launch in to sell our OP on a device, (external HDD), he says he has no desire whatsoever to have. I'm going to stand pat at saying, the question can't be effectively answered, until you get the motherboard model, and the connectivity method of all the drives in the system. Don't think the irony escapes me that if the OP had those answers, he might not have had to ask the question.
You can see my reasoning in my edited response. No one, not me, not anyone, tried to sell the OP on an external drive. "Why" is not "You should", it's just "why"? Often, if you can get the "Why" answered, you can make reasoned arguments for or against proposed courses of action. So, the answer to your question is that I read the question as carefully as my old brain allowed and came up with my best answer.
That's pretty much a given, but still I'm not given to guessing. It does make perfect sense but, there are assumptions that have to be made. If there are 2 HDDs, and an optical, all IDE, then there should be one more IDE channel available on ribbon cable 2. If so, why ask the question? Gee, maybe there's 2 opticals. Are you staring to see my point? No, "handy", (again IMO), is a flash drive, and an extra HDD inside the case. That said, I use multiple desktops as a backup "solution". This so you can get my frame of reference on that. Well, I'm really old, and it doesn't seem to be more than a ten minute job to replace an internal HDD. There have been so many threads here complaining about externals being inaccessible, for one reason or another, I'll continue to avoid what seems more of a hassle than a "handy". See "H", Jimbo's on the ball here;
why thank you CaptainCranky With a bit of luck andoyan will be able to answer these questions for us and put a stop this "awful" (but vaguely amusing ) dilema Jimbo!
People ask questions because they're ignorant or inexperienced. A ten minute job for you can be an overwhelmingly complicated, nearly incomprehensible task for a newbie. A flash drive with a 4 GB capacity isn't near as handy as an external with a TB capacity. I recommend and install external drives frequently, so maybe this is a philosophical difference. Internal drives die frequently as well, so there's not much to choose from when it comes to reliability. As I said, "If there's only one optical drive." Again, newbies ask questions because they don't know. With any luck this won't be one of those threads where the OP disappears and we'll get some more info to resolve all this.
