4 Connection Ide

[jbbdude]

I have a Dell... Anyway, i have 3 new hds, and want to hook them up. other than heat, which i will solve with fans that attach to the backs of the hd (i know, dell cases suck... better than using the old ibm netvista case), and ram, which i'll get 2 gigs (i work on the cheap), i have 1 more prob... hooking 3 hds to 1 controller. I think i found a few 4-connection ides, but is this possible? plausible, no... but can a dell controller handle it?

I just get old tech by the barrelful, and am working on updating ALL OF IT!!! it's a gift... and a curse. where i live, a 700 gig pc is massive... i don't want to hear about your terrabyte machines, i don't got that kinda $$$.

anyhow, i have a dell dimension 4550. a new case is out o the question. i know dell cases suck, but i have it so DEAL WITH IT!!!

(the machine has a 3rd hd-size slot designed for a floppy drive, so it has a 2nd floppy connector... if that can be connected somehow for less than like 1 billion $s.....)

[sav2880]

Well, Parallel IDE is always limited to 2 items per channel ... if it's SATA drives, you can put 3 in no problem although I don't own anything SATA yet myself.

If you're stuck on PATA your only way to expand on that woud be to buy an add-on card, which you could get from newegg.com for probably under $40, and that would give you more drives to pick from.

OR ... you could buy an external enclosure and turn one of those drives into a USB drive. I have a couple of these enclosures, but on my dying hardware, the USB ports can be finicky, so I don't even take advantage of this yet. You can get enclosures for well under $30 nowadays.

So you've got options, both internal and external.

[cartooncd]

one problem you might have with multiple drives could be the power supply. most times the power supply bundled with PCs can only handle 2 to 3 drives. add a few more and some of your drives could suddenly hang in the middle of reading/writing. 400watts power supply or higher is recommended if you have a lot of drives.

i had problems with usb enclosures as well. they're great at the start but after a few months once in a while my pc have problems reading the drive. then after a few more months a chip in the hard drive suddenly got fried.

so personally i am trying to stay away from enclosures.