Best way to hook up 3 hard drives to a computer?

[darkscythe]

I currently have a 160GB and a 60GB connected, 160GB as primary, and 60GB as a secondary drive, but I am looking to add another 160GB, making my 60GB my primary drive with OS and programs, and the 2x160GB storage drives. What would be the best way to do this? Thanks.

 

[Chaotic42]

Are they all PATA (with the wide ribbon connectors)?

If so, how many PATA ports do you have on your motherboard? If you only have two, I'd do it like this:

Primary Master-OS Drive
Primary Slave-160GB Backup Drive
Secondary Master-DVD
Secondary Slave-160GB Backup Drive

If you're lucky enough to have four ports, put one drive on each one.

 

[darkscythe]

Hey, thanks for the advice, i'm pretty sure i got PATA, here is pic
Text
The problem is, the IDE cable for my dvd rom drive is not long enough for me to put the hdd in the bottom lower deck between that hard drive gap you see, i'd like the hdd to be as cool as possible, rather than buy a 5.25 bay adapter to fit the hdd in that area, any other suggestions? maybe a longer IDE ribbon, and might as well make a switch to round? please advise
thanks

 

[0roo0roo]

o/s partition of ~10gb and keep games off it so u can make a image and restore it easily

 

[Chaotic42]

Could you just slide the DVD drive down to the bottom-most 5.25" bay?

I understand your cable length problems, I've got a 17-bay case and it's hard to manage sometimes.

Could you do it this way:

DVD in the bottom-most 5.25"
Floppy where it is.
Backup drive under the floppy.
Skip a space.
OS drive under that.
Skip a space.
Other backup drive under that space.

 

[darkscythe]

my case has a front cover and an empty slot made for easy access for cdrom drive, otherwise i would do it, great thinking on your part though, appreciate it much. would a 36" cable be enough? thanks.

read review on your case, thats a really really really big rig man...nice

 

[Accord99]

Stick with the 160 as the Primary OS drive. Most likely, the 60GB is the slowest of the three drives.

 

[0roo0roo]

silicon image pci controllers go for about 20 bux. one drive per cable is optimal. not required... but nice. ide kinda bogs when two devices on same cable are acessed at the same time

 

[Delorian]

Originally posted by: Accord99
Stick with the 160 as the Primary OS drive. Most likely, the 60GB is the slowest of the three drives.

I agree. The 160 should be a much faster drive, better suited for your OS and swap file.

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
o/s partition of ~10gb and keep games off it so u can make a image and restore it easily

Yes, this is true as well, take one of your 160GB drives and give it a 10GB partition as C. Use this for your OS. Make your other 160GB have a 10GB partition as well (call it whatever drive letter you like) and use this partition for your swapfile only. Then I'd make the other three (the remainder of the two 160GBs and the 60GB) drives into other partitions/drive letters or you could mount into directories to save on the number of drive letters used. This will seperate the OS and the swap file on two different physical drives that are more than likely faster than the 60GB. Also the IDE controller mention is worth looking into as well. It should speed up access to your drives.

 

[stevty2889]

You could also get a 5.25" mounting kit to mount one of the hard drives underneath the DVD-Rom, so that the cable could reach both of them.

 

[pinki]

10 gig dedicated partition for swap file ... lol.

this is very simple 60 gig drive for windows connected to dvd

both 160 on secondary chain in a striped raid 0 array done in windows through the software if you need to know how to go to tomshardware and search for software raid.

and teh swap file should be split 2:1 ratio on both drives supported by win xp but not win 9x you should put 256 meg on 60 gig and 512 meg on the striped drive

even if you dont do the software striping you should put 256 megs of the swap file on each of the hard drives

copying data from 1 partition to another on the same drive is exponentially slower than copying from drive to drive there fore you should never have your swap file on your operating system drive if you can help it, though you should always stripe it if you can.

 

[Zepper]

Each drive on its own channel is always top performance. As another mentioned above, the SiliconImage based controllers (Syba from dealsonic.com et al.) are the cheap (and surprisingly good - can even do RAID later if you want) way to do it if you want.
.bh.

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