can I have 4 drives in my computer?

[supernova87a]

I've got a Abit Kt7 board, and I'd like to install 2 more drives, making 4 total (I've already got two, need more space for lots of data).

My first two are on ide primary, as master and slave, and they work just fine. What I'm trying to do is put these 2 new drives on the ide secondary, as master and slave. (removing my cd rom)

The problem is, they're not recognized! I know they work, because if I put one or the other on ide primary (slave), they're ok and recognized.

Is this a jumper problem? Or is it too many drives?

Any tips?

Thank you in advance!

 

[Adul]

you can use 4 drives. I know I have done so many times.

Some more details on your hardware will be nice.

 

[bigbootydaddy]

jumper, the rule for onboard (or card) is 2 per channel

so you should have 4.

are the ports ata100??

what mobo?

 

[Joemonkey]

shouldn't be too many drives...

one thing to check, is in the bios, check the 2nd IDE channel, and make sure the slave setting is auto... i think it defaults to NONE which could be causing the problem

also (i'm sure you did, but never hurts to check) make sure jumpers are correct.

 

[bacillus]

<< The problem is, they're not recognized >>


is this in bios or windows?? if in windows,have you fdisked &amp; formatted these new hdds?

 

[IamDavid]

Sounds to me your jumpers are wrong or your Bios need to changed to autodetect drives.

 

[Joemonkey]

holy crap when i hit reply, there were no replies.... now there are 5?! we are some helpful bastards...

 

[supernova87a]

Well, the 2 new drives are Western Digital Caviar 80gb, and I've set the jumpers as shown on their web page so that they're master and slave, physically connected on the ide secondary.

I mean, it used to recognize my CD drive on this same cable/port -- so shouldn't this be working?

 

[Joemonkey]

did you try what i suggested about the BIOS? had the same problem when i used to just have 2 primarys, and added on a slave to the secondary IDE cable... when i added on the other component, NEITHER were recognized, all because the BIOS had slave set to NONE instead of AUTO

 

[loosbrew]

go into the bios and set them noth to autodetect. or have the bios detect them for you. should work unless your drives are fubared. even if they werent formatted they should show up, they would just be usueless.
loosbrew

 

[supernova87a]

OK, I think I've got it now -- both BIOS and startup recognize the drives -- and so does partitionmagic!

Something strange though -- on startup it says, &quot;80 pin conductor not recognized on ide secondary&quot;

Is this something to worry about?


Thanks for all your help!!

 

[knutp]

This means that you can't run the harddrives in udma 100. This shouldn't be a big problem, but to be on the safe side go out and buy a 80 conductor ide cable (udma 66/100)

 

[spamboy]

The cable will never be an issue but if you are anal you can go buy a 80 pin cable. Your hard drives will never use the extra bandwidth.

 

[supernova87a]

Here's a followup question now that everything is working ok (thanks all!):

If I wanted the fastest transfer rate between a particular pair of drives, should I put those drives on the same ide channel (like primary), or put one on primary and the other on secondary?

I'm getting something like a 1.1 Mb/sec transfer rate between the two drives right now, on the same channel -- can that be right?

Thanks!

 

[IcemanJer]

er, yeah, I think they would be faster if they're on different IDE channels. Also the physical location of the data the you're reading and writing will affect the transfer speed. And the drive's seek time, buffer size...

 

[SpeedTrap]

you can theareretically have up to 16 drives in your case 3 extra promise cards would do that
but that would be it and youd need a huge ass PS.

would be one huge ass file server

 

[supernova87a]

Wow, my drives are now actually hot to the touch! Especially the three that are stacked on top of each other -- the middle one is really hot!

Is this anything to worry about? Should I try to separate them more?