more hard drives

[snodogg21]

i have 2 harddrives on my computer but i need to get a larger one is it possible to have more than 2 hard drives on a normal ata controller or whatever it is that controls the hard drives on a dell desktop computer(optiplex gx110)? i dont really know to much about this stuff please help

[Philip1952]

IDE can only support 2 devices per channel. If you already have 2 HDD's+cd-rom. Then you can handle one more.
Any more IDE devices. Then you will need to add a controller card.

[Kurylo]

Wait until a Serial ATA emerges and insert as much as you want.

[snodogg21]

thanks for the help as i already have 4 ide devices i guess i will get a controller board, one more question came to me as i was looking at controllers, does ide raid really increase speed noticeably enough to be worth it i know i dont want to drop all of the cash for scsi but ide raid doesnt look too expensive

[Philip1952]

My first SCSI setup.
Adaptec 29160 Used $100.
Atlas 2 10k $125 used. (now around $60 to $75 used)
I now have a Cheetah 15k I use on XP. The Atlas is going in my girls computer in the not to distant future.
That isn't much more than going IDE controller and a couple of IDE HDD's.
The Atlas2 will have about the same transfer rate as IDE raid 0. But the access time will be half of raid 0. Most drives in raid 0 run around 12 mls to 14 mls. The Atlas is 7 mls access time.
Raid 0 if you try it. Backup Often . You can drop a stripe so easy it isn't funey. Most people talk about a drive dying. But all it takes is a power failure during a file write to disk and you will break a stripe.
I have used raid 0 before. Three reloads in about 6 months. One from a hard drive dying. The other two were from broken stripes. One was a power failure. The other one I have no idea what happened.
Then I decided if I need a faster hard drive system time for SCSI.

[elleon30033]

snodogg, but the short answer to your question concerning raid is Yes, it is so much faster it is worth the investment. Especially if you are a gamer....do it man, read this....say ok, then leave now to get your Raid setup:D