IDE and Slave Drives

Doc Evil

This might seem like a silly question but can you slave a hard drive off your floppy disk drive?

I have no other room to slave something off and no free IDE slots I want to increace my hard drive space, and find the thought of moving everthing to another bigger drive like removing my eye teeth.

Thanks if you can help me out on this.

aidan_dunne

Not that I know of. Different sized connectors on the cables and all that (the floppy's one is smaller).

If you want to put more than two hard drives in your machine you could always go the SCSI route. Daisychain a few drives together off a SCSI card. Just a thought.

Cake Fiend

Er... no. Shockingly enough, you can't run a hard drive on a floppy drive controller.

What you could do is buy a seperate PCI ATA (IDE) controller card which will allow you to attach another 4 ATA devices to your motherboard. I'd reccommend getting an ATA100 or 133 capable controller so you can run ATA100/133 capable (faster) hard drives through it. A lot of popular RAID controller cards (Promise, HighPoint, etc) are ATA100/133 capable.

ATA technology has progressed so far that SCSI isn't really worth it unless you're running a powerhouse server.

tman

and make sure your power supply can take the strain of an extra card + however many drives you want to plug in

and no free IDE slots

you'll prolly want a new case in that case (i'm assuming you mean hd bays)
if you have a spare cd bay you could always get some brackets to fit the drive in place

Doc Evil

Thats great advice people thanks.

I would never have thought that PCI slots could be switched to ATA. cheers aidan_dunne & Sico

And fear not tman I have plenty more watts and plenty more bays to sit them in.

Now I just have to order the damn card, ... now where did I put my girlfriends credit card?:D

whosurpaddy

on a kinda related note, can u install more than 4 ide devices without resorting to raid or scsi or a copntroller card? i.e. can you get a y splitter or somthin similar for an ide cable

Cake Fiend

http://www.komplett.ie/k/kl.asp?AvdID=1&CatID=15&GrpID=8&t=2051&l=2

Grab one of those babies and you're sorted.

Drazhar

very cool sico, very cool. Wasnt aware you could purchase such things. Thankfully i gots me the Kr7a-RAID board, no need for such cards, but very cool anyway.

whosurpaddy

thanks for the link sico, but i no u can get controller cards to expand your ide capabilities, but what i wanted to no was

Originally posted by whosurpaddy
can you get a y splitter or somthin similar for an ide cable

Inspector Gadget

Something people can forget when doing this sort of thing is that a lot of RAID cards will only take hard discs (i.e. no ZIP/DVD/CD drives); you'll have to put these on the motherboard's controller. (This is true of most of them, AFAIK; I'm certain it's the case for the Highpoint cards, and I think the Promise ones are similarly restricted)

Another useful thing to remember is that if you end up having to connect your bootable hard disc on the RAID controller, you can instruct your motherboard to boot from "SCSI" - in this case, it should find, and boot from, the RAID controller. Put that drive as primary master on the RAID controller just in case.

HTH,
Gadget