hard drive question

[TheJudeoMoor]

Ok, I'm a total newbie to hardware. If I get a PCI IDE hard drive controller, how many drives can I add, or is this dependent on the particular card as I suspect? and if I have two or more PCI slots, how many can I add? Thanks

[nimrod]

not quite sure what you are trying to do here.Are you trying to find out how many hard drives you can add to a particular system using multiple ide controler cards? in your pci slots. Or do you just want to add an extra hard drive(S) to your system?

[TheJudeoMoor]

i want to add one or two external hard drives, what is the best way of doing this? do i need a pci slot for each drive, or can i connect 2 or more to one ?

[EastSt]

External hard drives are not that common on PC's anymore.
Tell us what you want you are trying to accomplish, there may be a better way.
Then maybe there isn't.

[TheJudeoMoor]

i just want to add another hard drive or two

[Fingers]

Most motherboards have two IDE connectors, each of them supports 2 IDE devices for a total of 4 IDE devices.

Each PCI IDE controller cards will either have have 1 or 2 IDE connectors, which will support either 2 or 4 additional drives respectively. So if you put in 1 PCI controller card, you can have up to 8 drives.

I don't know anything about external hard drives.

ps, you said you're a hardware "newbie", you are aware that your motherboard will most likely already support 4 IDE drives...right?


[This message has been edited by Fingers (edited 04-01-2001).]

[Bsdboy]

External drives are usually connected by
usb or firewire and cost quite a bit more
than internal ide drives.

Bsdboy