How to connect more than 4 IDE internal drives?

[zulu9812]

Ok, here's the situation: I have a DVD drive, a DVD-R drive and 2 HDD, all internal. I only have enough interfaces on the power cable for 4 drives, but I want to add a 3rd drive (I need to acces it to get some data, and I'd also quite like to have the extra space without having to just buy a new hard drive). How would I go about adding more 'slots' for the power cable? Is it just a case of buying a bigger power supply, i.e. will the cable that comes with that have more 'ends'?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You could use one of these:

But if your PSU only has 4 molex connectors it might not be a very large one, 400 watts is pretty much a minimum these days if you've got lots of stuff connected.

The question is, do you have enough IDE connectors to add a fifth device? With the usual 2 connectors on the mobo that's only enough to connect 4 drives total.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Get a controller card that plugs into one of your PCI slots if one is available on your motherboard and plug additional hard drives into that. A good one may offer better performance than pluggin with an IDE connector. If your using more than 2 hds you may benefit from a large power supply. Oh by the way a lot of retail (in the box not OEM plastic bag) hard drives such as Maxtor come with controller cards and PSU expansion cables that are sufficient.

 

[kcwong]

You could also buy a IDE to USB cable, and a power cable. So you just connect the harddisk to power and USB, and use it as an external drive.

It's probably cheaper than buying drawers or controller cards.

 

[zulu9812]

Well, my power supply is 350W, so I should probably upgrade - but would a larger power supply come with more power cable connectors?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

350 watts should be Ok, unless you've got one of the newer video cards that draw a lot more power. My PSU is the same size but has 6 connectors, as I only have a Kyro2 it's enough.

If you use USB to connect the drive you'll need USB 2.0 btw, trying to do that with USB 1 will be excruciatingly slow and prone to errors.

 

[zulu9812]

Ok, but will a bigger power supply have more power connectors? Incidentally, since Crazy Eddite seems to be intimating that it can vary, is there any way of finding out before I buy?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Unless the manufacturer says on their website or something, you'd need to look. 6 connectors used to be fairly common but as SATA drives use a different plug the newer ones might have less.
If you're going to spend money on controllers/cables/PSUs anyway, you might be better off buying a new larger HD to replace one of the old ones, they're not expensive these days and you can never have too many spare HDs IMO.

Or, if you have USB 2.0 you might want to look at one of these things: Icy Box (available with Firewire too)

 

[stormbind]

You can get addon controllers as mentioned.

These can be SATA, EIDE, SCSI, or whatever.. one of the most popular sellers is IDE/RAID. If you two identical hard drives then you can use RAID (mode 0) to create single drive from them both.

The RAID controller reads/writes to both drives at the same time for double performance. SATA/RAID is even better, if you can afford it

Well, my power supply is 350W, so I should probably upgrade - but would a larger power supply come with more power cable connectors?

I have not noticed any such pattern. You can buy cable splitters though.