I have too many hard drives for the standard IDE cable connectors on my computer. What are the other options for dealing with multiple hard drives?
You have many options when you’ve used up the standard 4 ide channels.
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Go over to good o’l SCSI. It’s fast, and you can put 17 devices on one cable!
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Buy an IDE add-on card. preferrably an UDMA-133 one and you’ll have another 4 channels to use!
Unfortunately both these options need a free PCI slot, if you have none, then you’re reduced to another box with HDDs in it networked to your PC or external USB devices both are slow the network option being better with a peak rate of 10MB/sec (thats the 100 megabits/sec) (unless you happen to buy gigabit cards…)
What about RAID? I have heard of this before, what is it? I thought that I needed a special hard drive for scsi?
Yes, you will need SCSI HDDs for SCSI cards. I should have made that more clear.
As for RAID, its just a way of linking HDDs for speed and/or redundancy. It does have its drawbacks though - you really need the same HDDs at least in size to get the most out of it (you can have different sizes, but the difference between the biggest HDD and the smallest will be wasted.) Most SCSI and new IDE cards have RAID built in but if you have to pay more for it, don’t. According to http://www.tomshardware.com the built in RAID functions of windows 2000 and XP are identical in performance to the hardware based ones.
I’d say just get another UDMA card on the cheap, and hope that your power supply can handle the load of all these hard drives (mine didn’t but I use SCSI so…)
Yes, you will need SCSI HDDs for SCSI cards. I should have made that more clear.
As for RAID, its just a way of linking HDDs for speed and/or redundancy. It does have its drawbacks though - you really need the same HDDs at least in size to get the most out of it (you can have different sizes, but the difference between the biggest HDD and the smallest will be wasted.) Most SCSI and new IDE cards have RAID built in but if you have to pay more for it, don’t. According to http://www.tomshardware.com the built in RAID functions of windows 2000 and XP are identical in performance to the hardware based ones.
I’d say just get another UDMA card on the cheap, and hope that your power supply can handle the load of all these hard drives (mine didn’t but I use SCSI so…)
Yes, you will need SCSI HDDs for SCSI cards. I should have made that more clear.
As for RAID, its just a way of linking HDDs for speed and/or redundancy. It does have its drawbacks though - you really need the same HDDs at least in size to get the most out of it (you can have different sizes, but the difference between the biggest HDD and the smallest will be wasted.) Most SCSI and new IDE cards have RAID built in but if you have to pay more for it, don’t. According to http://www.tomshardware.com the built in RAID functions of windows 2000 and XP are identical in performance to the hardware based ones.
I’d say just get another UDMA card on the cheap, and hope that your power supply can handle the load of all these hard drives (mine didn’t but I use SCSI so…)
Another option is to find an old PC. A Pentium I computer is dirt cheap and depending on application, good enough to function as a file server.
ouch, a triple post… that’ll teach me for having lots of windows open and using the back button on my mouse to much.
A network file server would be ok, but you’d get a lot more speed spending your money on a udma card (10MBytes/sec peak vs whatever the HDD can do (about 20-30 sustained)) Plus the udma card would be easier to configure, and you might be able to boot of it too!
On the other hand, an old pentium is good to have lying around the place. Its a good gateway (no loosing your dial up connection on a crash) or if you have 2000, to play the old DOS games that won’t work anymore!
Don’t forget Firewire/IEEE 1394 – hot-swappable, high bandwidth, and supports up to 63 devices on a single daisy chain. Makes SCSI look like the antiquated dog that it is.
I researched this un.
Um, no. Firewire ain’t the end all http://www.apple.com/firewire/ states that firewire that the bandwidth of 400Mbps, thats bits not bytes. Theres 8 bits in a byte, plus parity and stuff like that so just assume 10 bits in a byte for simplicities sake. that gives us about 40MB/s.
Ok, so this is 30x better than USB. I only used USB as a way to use HDDs without using a PCI slot, which most people would have to do for firewire.
UDMA-66 has a transfer rate of 66MB/s ref: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/unstdUltra66.html this is 26MB/s better than firewire, and this is an
old IDE standard. you should see what they’re doing with SCSI - the PCI bus is the bottle neck there i.e. Ultra160 SCSI - PCI can only transfer 133MB/s this thing can handle 160! Not to meantion Ultra 320… Time to get that mobo with the 64bit pci bus eh?. I therefore fail to see your logic that firewire is better than SCSI just because it supports 63 devices. I mean who’d wan’t to get 63 firewire HDD’s at double the cost and a fration of the speed of SCSI?
btw, http://www.storagereview.com/ is a great site giving reviews on hard drives as well as easy to understand info about all these interfaces
SCSI is also hot swappable and has a higher bandwidth. 
Having 63 devices on one chain sounds silly, since one break in the middle is all you need to make life Hell. 
Ok, so what can I do with the hard drives that I have now? I would like to keep them in my current computer.
I’d say just get another UDMA card on the cheap, and hope that your power supply can handle the load of all these hard drives.
But if you have cash, go SCSI.
That are also switching devices that will allow you to chose 1 of three harddrives you wish to use. This is mainly for sepperating date i.e. a work HD and a play HD.
There is one entirely real advantage to FireWire if you’ve already got a bunch of ATA / IDE hard drives sitting around and don’t want to replace them with SCSI drives in order to add more hard drives to your system: FireWire external enclosures are generally adapters, and the drives in them are not native FireWire hardware but ATA instead. (There may be native FireWire drives out there by now, but if so they are a new development).
So you could get a FireWire card and some empty external FW cases and put your extra ATA drives in them and use them that way.
Another solution, if eighty bucks isn’t a huge issue, is to just buy a new, jumbo-sized hard hard drive. You can probably find one in the value price range that’s still bigger than two (or more) of your old drives. Copy everything fro m the old ones onto the new one, and donate the old ones, and you now have an extra drive slot and likely lots of space still left on the new drive.
Probably not that much more expensive than buying a new HD controller card, and no power supply worries.
Well, since I’m delurking all over the place anyways…
You have more than 4 IDE Hard Drives. That’s not a problem. There are a variety of ways to go about keeping them. The simplest of ways is an add on IDE Controller board, as Krust has been telling you. There are a variety of IDE controller boards to choose from. Basically it depends on what you intend to use the hard drives for. Time for a crash course in storage. If you have no desire to read this, skip to the bottom. There’s some suggestions there.
** IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics **
IDE or EIDE as it is now used is the international standard and choice for all storage devices. Using 40 pin cables you are able to connect two IDE devices per bus. One Master and one Slave. The Master being the first bootable device on that bus. IDE can be used for a variety of devices from Hard Drives and CD-ROMS to more esoteric equipment like ZIP/JAZZ drives and WORM drives. The average computer comes with two IDE buses. A Primary and a Secondary. This allows the average PC to support 4 IDE devices. Usually a hard-drive and CD-ROM leaving two free channels. Users who build their own PC’s now have the option of getting dual IDE controllers or RAID controllers on-board, meaning attached to the motherboard. More on this in a moment.
** SCSI - Small Computer System Interface **
SCSI was originally designed by IBM to be a replacement for something called Micro-Channel (don’t worry about that). Since it’s creation it has gone through numerous evolutions. To explain SCSI in depth would require a whole thread of it’s own so I will avoid that. SCSI gained popularity for two reasons. One, it allowed for RAID and Hot-Swapping of drives. (More on that later) And two, because Macintosh chose it over PC’s IDE format. It should be noted that now all Mac’s use IDE. SCSI has basically three formats: SCSI, SCSI II WIDE, and SCSI LVD. This is simply fast, faster, and fastest. SCSI is faster than IDE by a good margin do to the way it’s engineered. Instead of requiring the controller to tell the drives how to function as IDE does, SCSI allows each drive to control itself. SCSI is both rare and expensive. It’s pretty much reserved for either Power Users or File Servers.
** RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives **
RAID is a technology created to solve large storage problems. In the modern office data is life. RAID allows for extreme fault tolerance using two types of storage methods. RAID 0 or Striping and RAID 1 or Mirroring. Stripping works like this. Take four hard-drives of the same size and speed. The RAID controller treats them as one large volume. When you write data to the volume it gets spread evenly across the 4 hard drives (Their individual sizes are combined to one huge size. 4gig x 4 HD = 16 gig total.) When the data is accessed it hits every other hard drive in sequence. While data 1 is being accessed data 4 is moving into position to BE accessed. This actually increases the access speed to a magnitude of 4x. Not to shabby. Mirroring works like this. Take those same 4 hard drives. Rather than spreading the data across them lets write the SAME data to all 4 drives. Each drive is a mirror of the other. If the first drive fails, no worries. The RAID controller skips to the next drive in the sequence and starts up. No downtime, no loss of data. The first hard drive gets “Hot Swapped” (removed while the PC is on) and replaces with a spare. The RAID controller then restores the data from one of the 3 other operational drives to the new drive. I should note ** ONLY SPECIAL CONTROLLERS ARE HOT SWAP. DONT TRY THAT AT HOME! **
** Suggestions **
If you’re just running IDE drives, get a cheap Promise IDE Controller. They can be had for as little as $30US. If you’re wanting to get High Tech then opt for the Hi-Point Rocket Raid 404 4 Channel IDE RAID controller. (Ohh… Hot Swap 0/1 IDE RAID:cool: )
The links lead to the vendors own web sites and not purchase sites. For that you are on your own. 