5 Devices at once, is it possible?? (3 Opticals, 2 HD's)

[ballroomwest]

Hi, I've just treated myself to a whole new PC setup (see my profile) geared towards gaming.

One of the main problems is getting my 2 DVD writers, a Cd writer, a Maxtor 200 Sata hard drive, AND a regular Seagate 250 GB Ide Hard drive working all at once.

I know PC's only normally recognise four IDE devices, but I figured because I have Four Sata slots, they'd be treated seperately from the IDE's?

All 3 optical drives work fine, the Maxtor works fine and is displayed in My Computer, but the Seagate 250MB (not yet formatted) doesnt appear.
I'm guessing thats cos its not formatted yet. It does show up in the Device Manager under Hard disks so the PC is obviously able to communicate with it or it wouldn't report a drive at all.

Do I need to fool around with the BIOS?

(If it's not possible to have the PC have more than two optical drives then why build such large cases with 4 or more bays if you cant use them!) :monkey:

Thanks for any suggestions...

 

[MrGaribaldi]

It is quite possible to have 5 drives in a computer, actually if you have 2 IDE PATA channels and 4 SATA channels, you can have 8 drives. But you have to make sure that you have a strong enough powersupply to run them all. A quality 400W+ should be minimum.

 

[ballroomwest]

thanks

Cheers for confirming that, I'll look into it some more.

So you do think its possible to have 3 CD/DVDs one regular IDE drive and one SATA drive (if theyre configured correctly?)


I do have a 400 Power supply, i wouldnt say it was 'quality' though, its just stock. It's annoyingly noisy so I think I'm gonna replace it and get a more powerful one especially as I'm gonna be running two Nvdia Sli GT 7800's on it!

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Before my last upgrade I ran 4 harddrives and 2 optical drives, so I know it's quite possible. That you're using the SATA controller instead of a RAID controller makes it even easier...

I think you're in need of upgrading that PSU. Stock PSU's often aren't all that good, and if you're going for a SLI setup at the same time, you're going to need a beefy PSU! I'd look into 600+ if I were you...

 

[SNGX1275]

It will work fine, the reason you can see the disk in device manager and not My Computer is because it doesn't have any partitions on it yet. You can set them up easily enough though with Disk Management.

You can find that in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools

Just right click on the drive (it will be obvious which on it is) and create partition. Set up the partitions any way you like, its pretty easy.

 

[tom_pearson]

just out of interest why are you using 2 DVDRWs???