Hard Drive Question - How many can you have?

Good evening computer wizards and wizardettes,



Got a few questions for you, please bear with me as i am not remotely close to a computer genius.................



Essentially i have a rather large music collection, its almost 250 Gig and I need to ensure i have it backed for obvious reasons. Also, recently i have had a few unexpected deaths amongst my external hard drives.



Anyway, i have one 250gig drive in my PC and i managed to put in another 250gig drive as a Slave today, all is working perfectly.



My question is, how many more drives can i put into my PC?



I assume this means my one data cable is now full with the two above mentioned drives on it.



I have another space for an IDE, which my CD/DVD drive data cable is plugged into. It does have a spare pin on it same as the one i connected the Slave drive to.

Would it be possible or wise to connect another 250 gig drive to this and if so would it function?



There are only these two IDE plugs, i also have the FDD plug with nothing connected to it. Could this be used for another hard drive?



Lastely, can i remove the slave drive i have installed today once it is full then connect a new drive to the same spot and assign it with another drive letter and keep doing this as many times as necessary. If i do this will the pC be OK with it as it seems like a cheap and easy way to solve my back up issues. I dontmind putting drives in and out if its as easy as it was to install the one i did today.



I must sound completely bonkers, any advice, tips and help would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks in advance................x

You can slave another ide drive to the cd/dvd drive on the secondary cable. But that can slow down your performance at times when trying to access files there and load files from it or the other drive slaved to primary host drive. No ide drive will connect to a floppy cable. If your board has SATA capabilty with an onboard controller you can add more drives there for storing addtional files. You can also go with larger ide drives.

Many are now using external usb drives to store larger amounts of files and data. Those simply plug into a usb port. With a dvd burner you can also create data dvds for additional storage if you have the right software. One free cd/dvd burning software is called BurnOn found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/

You can only have 4 devices plugged into the IDE ports, which is usually either 2 HDD and 2 CD/DVD Drives, or 3 HDD and 1 CD/DVD Drive. The floppy is just for a floppy drive, you cant install a HDD there.

If you really want to add more drives, you should look into a SATA controller, since you can add many more of those at a time.

there are harddrives now that you connect externaly with a casing or housing and it goes to your USB ports.

No worries thanks ladies and gents for that, i understand the external hard drives, i have a Lacie 250 gig and also an Iomega 120 gig.



It may sound like alto of storage, especially when i have two 250 gig drives in my PC now but its not enough.



Reason being, my music collection is almost 250 gig, if i have it on my PC and also on the slave on my PC thats all good and gives me a backup. However, it does not allow for the back up of my regular files, say 30 gig, which i can use the 120 gig Iomeag for.



That leaves the 250gig Lacie, well i need that seperate for swapping MP3 collections. I fill it with my collection, give it to someone else who then down loads it then copies their collection onto it. I then sift through their collection and get rid of all the double ups and keep all the higher bit albums and ones i dont have to increase my quality and collection.



Soooooo, to expand my collection further i will need another 250 gig drive at least, maybe two, to make sure whatever i get from friends will be stored and also backed up. With 250 gig already on the PC and duplicated on the backup 250 gig it leaves no room for expansion so i will be adding another one.



So sounds like slaving the third to the CD/DVD is not the ideal and could slow my PC down, dont really want that!!!



I understand that i could get bigger IDE drives but, i would rather have a few more smaller drives. Not sure if that is a logical approach?

Also i am buying the 250 gig Seagate IDE's for $104.00 AUD so they are cheap.



So, please tell me more about the SATA controller. That sounds like it would be the most suitable.

How much?

Could a novice like myself put it in or would i get this done at the computer shop?

How do i find out if my PC has SATA capability?

If it doesnt what can i do to sort it out.



Bring on Blue Ray Burners i say, 50 gig to one DVD and all my problems will be solved!!!



GIVE ME MORE STORAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Thanks again if you are able to help.

Also, forgot to ask.............



What about the theory of pulling out the 250 Gig Slave drive and then simply putting in another 250 gig drive and filling that as a backup.



It would be like using an external drive i guess but would require me to take off the computer housing each time i needed to back up. Taking off the housing is pretty simple and quick so i dont see that as much of a problem.



Do any of you do this?



Is it a sensible approach, it sounds straight forward to me but i'd like your thoughts.



The only problem i can see if making sure the PC recognises the different hard drives each time i connect them to the Slave data cable. If i assinged a different letter to each drive then marked the drive with that letter it would seem fool proof?



What da ya think about that?

What it sounds like you could use is a removable drive bay. They aren't that popular anymore, but they were about 15 years ago. You just power down the computer, pull the tray out and swap the drives. Buy several 250MB drives, label them and just keep swapping them.

another cost effective idea is buy a 3.5" external enclosure which converts ac power to molex and ide signal to firewire or usb

you can then buy cheap, large, ide hard drives and plug them into the external box

im not sure how easy it is to swap but it is certainly a good sight cheaper than buying external drives

also if you dont want to swap, you can get many of those boxes (they are like $30 ebay)

With SATA drives added to the system as well as larger ide drives you can increase capacity for each drive itself. I have thinking about the addition of four 400gb sata drives in the case here since I multi OS drives and need more space for Linux along with MS files. I know Western Digital has 320gb ide drives and Seagate carries 500 sata drives available. When you mention adding 30gb to the 250gb that equals 280gb.

You can also add drives using a controller card for SATA/RAID setups and some boards will handle 4 sata HDs. No dvd-rs go anywhere near 50gb at this time. But piling one drive after another on shelves to store files also has it's own limitations since you are dealing with magnetic storage devices. One old method was storing data and files on tape cartridges. But access times there were super slow. How about a server case? You can put a large number of large capacity drives into one of those.

Limitations such as what? Don't place them next to a big magnet? hehe. I have three sitting here right beside me as I'm typing this piled on top of each other. I have another sitting under a fan on one of the other desks. I did have several more on a shelf and some in a box. They're not as fragile as people think. Obviously you don't want to drop them or anything though. That wouldn't be a good idea. lol.



Anyways, increasing the capacity of the drive is not a bad idea, but I'm not too keen on the recommendation of adding a bunch of controller cards for the simple reasons that a) most cases can't hold too many drives and b) the more drives you have in the case, the more heat you generate. Stacking them on top of each other in the case is a bad idea and makes them prone to failure.