hooking up 3 HD

[adlianb]

i have 3 HD. two of them are 80G IBM deskstar and western digital and the other one is 120G maxtor. i'm using ECS K7S5A with AMD XP2000. i already hooked up two fo the harddrive and was wondering is there anyway i can hook up another drive, making a total of three HD to the system? my friend recommend RAID but have no idea what that is and how to use it. suggestion pls.....

 

[dude]

I dont' think your friend meant to tell you to use raid, but rather, use a raid card. Any IDE card will do fine, a raid version usually cost a little more.

I think your problem is you don't know you can hook up more than one IDE hard drive, or any device, for that matter. You can jumper your hard drive to cable select or use master/slave jumpers to make two hard drives work together on one ide cable.

For instance, on one cable, set your boot drive to master, your second hard drive to slave. On another cable, set your third hard drive to master, your cdrom to slave.

 

[tjaisv]

Dude is right, all you need here is an IDE card to plug into a PCI slot. It can be RAID or not. What RAID basically is is a feature that allows you to use 2 or more hard drives to increase your computer's speed and/or fault tolerance, depending on whichever level of RAID you configure for the RAID card. There's several levels: 0, 1, and 0+1 are the most common. RAID 0 means that your hard drives will be written to equally, thus increasing system speed and performance. RAID 1 is used when you want to have one or more hard drives as backups (just in case one hard drive fails, the other backup(s) will retain all your data). And RAID 0+1 is a combination of both.

 

[corkyg]

You can also add as many external HDDs as you wish using Firewire or USB 2. I have three drives on every computer. The third drive (external) is my data drive, and that lets me port them around as well.