Technofyed

So I've got a question, not a problem.
My question is, the big ribbon wires that plug into the Hard Drives and the Cd Rom/Dvd Rom drives, are those interchangeable?
What I mean is, say there are four ends, two from each wire, can I hook up 3 Hard Drives and one CD drive or vice versa using the two separate wires?
And also, does it matter which port I plug the wire into on the mother board? Like if I mix up the CD drive cord and HDD cord, does anything happen?

Connecting IDE Hard Drives

Yes it can be done but you have to do it right or the computer will try to boot into the wrong hard drive. This article talks about a primary/secondary channels & master/slave jumper settings & the hard drive that has your operating system on it must be the primary master.

Unfortunatly IDE hard drives are scarce (and getting scarcer). Right now the fastest/largest/cheapest hard drives are sata drives. Basically IDE drives are obsolete. That said if you don't already have these extra drives and you are planning on buying/building a new computer in the foreseeable future you should either consider waiting to buy the drives until then or going a head and buying sata drives and putting them in that computer. Putting a sata drive into a computer not designed for it is possible however you won't get the same performance as if you are putting it into a computer built for it however when you get or build another desktop those new drives can be transferred to the new computer and will out perform the IDE drives. In fact new computers probably will only come with one IDE/pata channel (if it comes with one at all) so you would only be able to put in 2 IDE drives without buying more parts. There are several ways to put a sata drive into a computer that doesn't have sata ports and if you are interested in going this route I can tell you how however that would require buying more parts.

(10-12-2009 11:02 AM)townsbg Wrote: [ -> ]Unfortunatly IDE hard drives are scarce (and getting scarcer).
...
Basically IDE drives are obsolete.

I disagree. Most laptops we get in for repair are 50/50, but I would say that Sata to IDE ratio on PC repairs is 90% IDE.

(10-12-2009 02:13 PM)no2pencil Wrote: [ -> ]I disagree. Most laptops we get in for repair are 50/50, but I would say that Sata to IDE ratio on PC repairs is 90% IDE.

This is true when it comes to existing systems but I'm talking about hard drive sales. On newegg most of the drives (as well as the largest & fastest) available are sata. The question is, as I see it, if he is thinking of buying/building a new desktop in the foreseeable future, and he is currently thinking of adding drives to his current computer, should he buy IDE or sata drives? I think Sata because most of them already sold are sata including those with the largest capacity & largest cache. Granted they won't perform like they would in a computer designed for sata but they will out perform an IDE drive when put into a new computer designed for sata. In essence I'm considering how a purchase of several hard drives now will affect him in the future. Would he want to put IDE or sata drives in a future computer? Obviously sata. So why not consider that now when thinking about purchasing new drives? Of course this is a mute point if he already has drives to put in his computer.

As an addition hypothesis I think in the future boards will be built with only 1 IDE channel, if that, as some already are. So if he buys 2 IDE drives now (which it sounds like he is planning) & later on he can only find mother boards with no more than 1 channel he will be able to only use 2 of his 3 drives without purchasing an add on card.

BTW right now on newegg the best options for IDE drives is either a western digital with 16 mb cache that is IDE ultra ata 100 for 73 USD or an hitachi Ultra ATA 133 with only an 8 mb cache for $70. Both are only 500 gb. 11 different models total and 2 are sold out.

The best sata drive for about the same price on newegg is a western digital 750 gb drive with a 32 mb cache for $60 or a 1 tb seagate with a 32 mb cache for $80. 70 different models ranging for an 80 gb western digital with an 8 mb cache for $34 to a 2 tb WD with a 64 mb cache for $300.

For those that don't know and are wondering 1 TB = 1000 GB.

Actually, 1 TB is 1024 GB, but close enough.

Quote:The question is, as I see it, if he is thinking of buying...

Notice that from his posts it seems like he has several old computers lying around. I'm guessing he might want to centralize drives from multiple computers in one machine.

Sorry but I didn't look up his history. I'm not used to doing that. Remember I come from a large forum that deals with one thread at a time. It is to big to look up history & most of them don't have a history.

I know the operating systems consider 1 tb to be equal to 1024 but the manufactures define in as 1000 which is why when you format a hard drive you lose some of the space.

I still say that SATA technology is crap. It's great if you want an inexpensive hard drive with large amounts of storage, & a world of head-ache. The phrase "you get what you pay for" comes from experiences like these.

If you are using SATA : Back up & back up often.

I have to agree with no2 on the SATA drives. They do seem to have a higher failure rate... Why is this?

Ok.. This is all very confusing.. lol.
So I've got like 10 Hard drives, they can all either be set as Masters, or Slaves, if that's what you're talking about.
My motherboard has 3 slots to plug in those ribbon wires, one slot is going to my DVDw Drive and another slot going to my Master HDD and my Slave HDD, my main question here is:

Can I use that last slot to connect 2 more Hard Disk Drives as Slaves?

Do you have multiple IDE ports on your motherboard, or just the one? If I'm understanding you correctly currently you have a three port IDE cable, and one is not being used? For that last IDE port you can only add one hard-drive. It should be set as "slave" on the jumper...

Awe, how come only one?

How can you connect more than one hard-drive if you only have one connector on the cable left to use? By the way, the connection on the cable that isn't being used. Is it closer to the motherboard, or is it the last connection on the cable?

It don't matter now =((
The wires don't fit, I'm assuming the last slot is for the floppy disk drive or something.

---

but I do have another question, I've seen on tv, movies, and such people connecting two or more towers together to make them all run on one system. If that makes any sense.

Yes, the slightly larger slot is for floppy drive cable. So your IDE cable to the hard-drive, and cd-rom doesn't have any connections left?

yeah, I got it, now I just gotta get the HDDs fixed, so do you have any idea what I mean about hooking up computers together?

If you're talking about trying to connect say two motherboards to run as one unit that isn't possible. The motherboards would have to be designed specifically to have that capability.

No, I mean, Idk, the best way I can describe it is they used, for example, two towers, used one that everything ran on, and the other just basically boosted the other tower, almost like there was a master and a slave, but with towers instead of drives.

You could set them up as a network and use the second computer for shared storage without a monitor. Would that work for you?

It sound like he wants to use one to add to the power of the other. That is called parallel processing (or computing I forgot which) & it is do able but certainly not easy. A friend of mine from school did that on a broader scale for his senior seminar project & he had to do low level Linux programming to get it to work. I don't know if it can be done in windows but if it can I'm sure the only version that would allow you to do so would be one of the server versions. I can't help you there.