Bob

I didn't know you could have more than four IDE drives. I thought you had to use SCSI drives for this.

Alan

We've had 8 IDE drives installed, 4 going to the two ATA/100 ports on the motherboard, and 4 more going to an IDE PCI card. I don't know what the limit is, but i suspect if your power supply is strong enough and you have enough slots available you could probably get up to 32 IDE drives connected. You might have to do something fancy with RAID though since DOS/Windows only supports 31 drive letters, and some of those will probably be dedicated to your floppy and optical drives.

Thanks Kelly, I wish I'd known that 5 years ago. Strange how you pick up little snippets of mis-information and never question it!

By the way, what's a floppy drive? :~)

Alan

"By the way, what's a floppy drive? :~)"

I believe it's a Sunday outing with the family in a car with worn-out shock absorbers. I could be wrong.

John

hey thanks all.. looks like I get to buy something new from newegg.com ...

let me know if any ideas on which IDE PCI card works best..

yeah I got a monster power supply, and it has 5 fans in the pc case, I built it to last... and temps have been low ever since, which is great..

also thx farss (?) for that external drive/usb connector w/power supply frombytecc suggestion, got one, haven't used it yet, but looks like a great tool, to run HDs externally, for temp backups/transfers.. got one from newegg...


ken

I have a half-dozen hard drives in my case, with 4 connecting via a PCI card.

If you're really planning on doing lots of projects, you can either use additional external drives (connected ideally through Firewire) or you can use those hard drive caddies that slide into a slot in the front of your PC. This is a very inexpensive way of increasing utility, since the individual plastic drive enclosures are only about $15. Traditionally, your PC needs to be turned off to do a swap, but maybe some newer designs allow for hot-swapping.

Ken:
You might want to hold off a little bit before you buy a card. I have an old IDE ATA 100 Promise Ultra card that I don't use anymore. Hopefully it didn't hit the trash yet. I can look for it and if I find it I would send it to you for whatever it costs to mail the thing. (I'll be embarrassed if it turns out that I can't find the thing, but I'll be happy to try. I know it works just fine...)

If you're going to add additional drives, you might consider getting a raid card instead. Then you could create a couple of striped raid arrays and the peformance of your drives would be a lot greater. E.g. I just ran Sandra on one of internal drives with a avg read speed of about 52MB/s. For my raid array, the average jumped to 92MB/s. You can get the same amount of storage, except that your read/write times will be faster. Just a suggestion.

wwaag

If you're really planning on doing lots of projects, you can either use additional external drives (connected ideally through Firewire) or you can use those hard drive caddies that slide into a slot in the front of your PC. This is a very inexpensive way of increasing utility, since the individual plastic drive enclosures are only about $15. Traditionally, your PC needs to be turned off to do a swap, but maybe some newer designs allow for hot-swapping.

By Asus P4C I assume you mean P4C800 (?). That mobo has onboard RAID capability for both IDE and SATA, thus you wouldn't need a new RAID card. If using only a couple of drives, you'd need to spend a lot of $ to get better RAID performance that the onboard RAID (because most low-budget RAID cards are actually software controlled by drivers).

For external drives, eSATA actually is incredibly faster than Firewire or USB, but this particular mobo doesn't have eSATA (though you can buy adapters for it, but budget is always a factor).

SATA drives are hot swappable, but sometimes the OS will get confused about drive letters.

If all you're wanting to do is make use of some old IDE drives that you have on hand and not spend much cash, an IDE controller card can fit the bill just fine. (Pun intended...) And riredale's suggestion of those plastic caddies is good too, because you can use those old drives to archive projects than file them away..

Try setting up your external drives as NTFS mounted drives. Each mounts up into the empty NTFS folder you assign it to. I had the same problem you describe until I changed to this approach and the externals now ALWAYS show up in the assigned spot. I even use this for my USB camera card reader - always mounts to My Incoming Photos folder under My Pictures.

>>SATA drives are hot swappable, but sometimes the OS will get confused about drive letters.

Jerry

By Asus P4C I assume you mean P4C800 (?). That mobo has onboard RAID capability for both IDE and SATA...

Not all P4C800 models. I think just the "Deluxe". (My wife and I both have the ASUS boards...mine has the IDE RAID, hers doesn't.)