How to Have More Than Two Hard Drives in a PC Virginia

Steps

1. You may remove your CD, DVD or floppy disk drive, that way you gain an additional bay for disks.
2. Laptop drives take up less space, but you will need a converter to normal IDE bus in order to connect it to your computer. Ensure that you know how to connect these properly, with the first pin always being connected to a marked wire on the cable.
3. Know your case's limits. If you don't have enough space then you have to buy a bigger case. There are cases out there (for computers that will act as beefy servers) that will take many disks in their stride.
4. Network drives can be attached to your network and will pretty much function as a locally attached disk. It may be slower but if you can't add it physically to your computer, there should be a compromise somewhere.
5. External hard drives are usually attached to a USB port, and are less expensive than equivalent network drives.

Tips

• Do not assume that you will be able to attach any more drives.
• Each IDE channel, or each ribbon cable, has 3 plugs. 1 for the motherboard and 2 for drives. No more than 2 drives can use an IDE channel. If you are out of connectors, you will have to install an IDE controller PCI card. If your motherboard supports it, use the faster Serial ATA (SATA) drives instead. Many motherboards support up to four SATA hard drives (rather than the usual 2 IDE) so you can create a RAID array.
• Most motherboards have two IDE headers, so you can only have a total of four devices, but some higher end motherboards (which probably won't be found in a retail computer) have three or four IDE headers so you can use up to six IDE devices.

Warnings

• Don't electrocute yourself. Always unplug the computer from the power socket before operating. Also, be sure to touch unpainted, uncoated metal before touching the computer, so that any static electricity you have doesn't flow into the computer.

Things You'll Need

• Case with a sufficient number of drive bays. If you do not have enough, remove the CD or DVD drive, if you can. You might also choose to remove your floppy drive and buy a 2.5" (laptop, requires adaptor and frame) or 3.5" hard drive.
• Available connectors for the appropriate type of drive: both power and data. There are splitters that can be purchased if you do not have enough power connectors.
• BIOS that supports that many and that size of hard disks, unless you are creating a RAID array.

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