3 Harddrive Question

[NivekC4]

I'm expecting to get my third harddrive in any day now, and was wondering what the jumper settings need to be. I know my first hardrive is set to master, second is set to slave, do I also set the third harddrive to slave or do I do the jumper setting called "cable select"?

Along with this harddrive I will be installing my Promise Ultra 66 controller card...how hard are these to configure and install? I've never done it before and I've read on the internet that it involves some fiddling in the bios.


Your answers are greatly appreciated.

-NivekC4

 

[Feanor727]

First off, the only problems I've had with controller cards were trying to run hard drives from them, while keeping your cd-roms connected to your mobo. As long as you don't do that, you should be fine. I would recommend just installing the card, and configuring the drive as a master connected to one of the new ide channels and leave the rest as-is.

 

[Scootin159]

You can only have 2 IDE devices/channel(cable).

I imagine your motherboard has 2 IDE channels and that you have a 4th IDE device (CD-ROM), so I would set it up like this:

IDE 0: Boot Drive (master) - 3rd HDD (slave)
IDE 1: 2nd HDD (master) - CD-ROM (slave).

If you want to use that Promise Ultra 66 card, you can put your HDD's on that as well:

IDE 0: 3rd Drive (master)
IDE 1: CD-ROM (master)
Promise 0: Boot Drive (master)
Promise 1: 2nd Drive (master)

to use the promise contoller you will need to install drivers for it
to boot off of it, you will also need to configure your BIOS to boot off a PCI IDE Controller, or a SCSI Card (it sometimes reconizes the promise card as a SCSI card). You will also need to configure the Promise BIOS to boot to one of the connected HDD's.

 

[boyRacer]

Correct. Your first hard drive will be master and your second will be slave. Your third will have to be master on the secondary IDE channel on the controller since I don't think one IDE channel can support more than two hard drives. The only fiddling I had to do with the controller was installing the drivers...unless you have a RAID controller, where you have to setup the array, I don't think you have to set anything else up. WindowsXP already has drivers for your card in case you are running XP.

 

[boyRacer]

LOL...yeah whatever Scootin said.

 

[NivekC4]

Ok so it should look something like this?

IDE 0: Main Harddrive (master), Secondary Hardrive (slave) <-- This is the current config I have
IDE 1: Plextor Burner (master), Acer CD-ROM (slave) <-- Same config I have right now too
Promise 0: Third Hardrive <-- Only modification I would need to do?

Would this config work? I don't want to boot off this harddrive or anything...i just want to be able to store files on it.