Hard Drive Question

[haner]

Hey gang,

In my system, I have 2 hdd's both on primary ide and on secondary ide, I have my CDRW and a DVD drive. I just bought a 20 GB 7.2k rpm hd and wanted to hook that up to my primary since it will be the fastest drive. My question is how can I go about doing this even though I already have 2 drives on primary?

Some suggested getting a controller card so I looked at promise's ULTRA100TX2. They said to plug it in and it should work. I'm new to the controller card business so I'm not sure what they mean. Can I have 3 HD's on primary?

Specs of machine:
Abit BH6 / Bios SS
Celeron 633
PC100 ram

I think that's all I need to put. Please give me some feedback/suggestions.

 

[corkyg]

You can only have two devices on a stock mobo IDE controller. If you want another IDE drive, you will have to add a PCI slotted IDE controller.

Another solution would be to remove your smallest, slowest drive and slap it in an external case and link with Firewire or USB for data and backup storage. Then put your new 20 gigger in the main stream.

 

[haner]

Yeah, I know that you can only have 2 devicers per ide slot. I was going to connect the 20 gigger to the controller card mentioned above. My question is whether I can make that my primary drive instead of the 2 hdd's connected to the mobo primary ide slot.

 

[JohnnyPC]

Sure you could make your new drive the primary one...all you would need to do is transfer the parttion from the ool primary to the new one. If you bought the HD in a retail box then it probably came with a disk on which you'll find the transfer utility. Or if you bought the drive as an OEM model, go to the MFGs website and download the utility from there. search around on the website and you'll probably even find the low down on the steps you need to take to get the job done. The new faster srive will make nice improvement if you're currently using one of the old school models from years past...

 

[haner]

Thanks. Yeah, my 2 drives now are very old school. I think I got them like 3 years ago. Paid a ton of money for them too. I don't really need to move the data over. I'm going to start fresh. I just hope that controller card works. I just found the cheapest promise card there is. The drive is only ATA33 so I don't see why it won't work.

Thanks for your help.

 

[hoihtah]

i've been using partition magic... for some time now... and they work great... for these purposes.
i definately recommend it.