another 3rd hard drive question

[scott]

Thanks for the input on spanning drives, etc. guys.

Now I've concluded that an ide cable plugged into a motherboard won't support three harddrives - even if I found a cable with 4 connectors. I guess I'd need to get another controller card right?

Given that I don't what to go that route, I could drop the small (40 GB) Harddrive and use the two big harddrives only - That would require that I transfer the OS and programs from the small drive to one of the big drives I'd be recording on.

I've heard that it's best to keep these seperate - how big of a deal is it?

512 MB in a really of 1 Ghs computer - playback mainly through an MVP. Thanks!

Maybe I should just get another controller, I hadn't wanted to spend the money on such an old computer, but it looks like another way will be such a pain...

[HtV]

Don't you have 2 ide-connections on your motherboard? Afaik (which is not that much) most motherboards have 2 connectors. So you can connect 4 devices.

[Ted the Penguin]

well, there should be 2 ide connectors on your mobo, and they each support 2 devices, what is on your other IDE cable? cant put the 3rd drive there?
and it would not be a huge deal to invest in a IDE controller card, and you could move that to any future upgrades if needed.

EDIT: CURSE YOU HtV... my internet connection was messed up and I was trying to post for the last 10 minutes

[HtV]

EDIT: CURSE YOU HtV... my internet connection was messed up and I was trying to post for the last 10 minutes

Well let's just be glad we gave the same answer.

[zen]

On newer MBs there are 4-6 SATA connectors but only 1 IDE connector (for optical drives).

So the answer is very dependent on the configuration of your motherboard.

Zen.

[scott]

I have two cables that look like ide cables - one cable goes to each of the existing harddrives.

The other cable goes to a DVD burner and has an open connection. Are you saying that I can plug a harddrive into the open cable port that is on the DVD ribbon cable?:confused:

[oster]

Are you saying that I can plug a harddrive into the open cable port that is on the DVD ribbon cable?:confused:

It is possible to put a optical drive (DVD) and a hard drive on the same IDE. I think there are recommendations about which should be the primary and which should be secondary - might pay to do a quick google on that though.

all the best

[HtV]

Yep, I think it's recommended to make the dvd-player slave and the hdd master. You can do that at the back of both devices.

[Ted the Penguin]

for the most part it does not matter if a drive is master or slave, usually the only finecky thing can be that your boot drive must be the bus 0 master, but after that most things just work. I also am too lazy to go look up whether you can actually override the cable positions with jumper settings on the drives. but I dont think so. so trying to make the DVD drive slave (middle of cable) and the HDD master (end of cable) is usually a pain for cable routing unless you have space above your DVD drive for the HDD

[idkpmiller]

sorry I didnt notice your previous question about the best way to add in a third drive. I would personally add it as a basic partition that way you can always use it to boot from later without necessarily deleting all your files and you can have up to 3 basic partitions.

that would then mena you need to have a foldr or directory that spans multiple drives this is easily achieved by using a hardly known about feature of winxp (im sure I read in your previous post that was your OS).

you make a folder called masterrecordings for example this could be on drive x
you use the tool I called "junction link magic" and add x:\masterrecordings as the root folder then you can add as many other folders under that one from any drive on the local machine or even across a network, they will all be visible from that folder.
This is very similar to how symbolic links work in unix. the tool to exploit the hidden feature of XP is here:

http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm

It is for advanced users so you may want to play with some dummy data and test throughily before commiting to it....

Also before I go, adding a hard drive to the same IDE channel (cable) as a CD/DVD drive will slow down the hard drive access speed but if you still have a 40GB drive in your machine you may not notice it anyway; as the 40GB drive is likely to be relatively slow compared to modern drives (less cache, possibly slower spin speed).

I am interested in what cpu speed you have as you desribed as an old machine, I have been toying with the idea to set up a separate PC for GBPVR but I am worried on how low I can go without impacting its useability.

Regards

Paul