I'm running out of space on my computer for my audio collection. I currently have 2x 120Gb ide drives. I no longer have any more ports to connect any more hard drives.

So I was thinking maybe there is some sort of pci adapter which allows more hard drives to be added to your computer.

I am not interested in the storage to be porbable. I would like it permanently in my computer case.

Does anyone know of any such hard drive adapter?

Ax

I assume you could get an internal SATA PCI card.

Do you have the bays to hold more hard drives?

Edit: an example: http://www.usb-ware.com/2-port-sata-pci-card-internal.htm

No idea if it's good, I just searched for "sata pci internal" on Google.

Edit: Wow, I've seen one with 4 internal and 4 external ports. Datalodahardrive.

Edit: I don't have SATA at home (and I've never had my work PC to bits) so I'm not that up on it. Looks like you may also need a molex converter as well though (http://www.seagate.com/support/presales/faq/sata_cables.html). Do these come with the hard drive?

So you'd be looking at SATA PCI card; SATA hard drive; SATA data cable; molex-SATA power adapter.

... unless your power supply already has sata power cables.

You could upgrade via external USB2 HDDs. This of course would mean that if you run out of available USB2-bandwith, you may need to upgrade with an additional USB2-Controller.

Great idea. That's what I do and its great for several reasons.

1. You have a backup of your music

2. You can attach the device to other computers

3. Its less of a hassle to deal with external drives

If there's a fire in the house, grab the external drive and run!

I got an IOgear Firewire 800 PCI card model GIC3800 to add three of those ports and an ioMega Triple Interface 400 Gb Black Series External Hard drive, http://tinyurl.com/bngrt . The Firewire 800 adpter card works in Wintel type PCs, even with a slot not extra long. Using Firewire 800, the hard drive is noticeably faster than the Maxtor One Touch 320 Gb external, which uses USB 2.0. The ioMega drive comes Mac OS X formatted, but you just need follow directions at ioMega's site to format FAT32 or NTFS.
The ioGear card comes with one Firewire 800 cable, which I used to connect my external enclosure NEC DVD-Rom drive, thereby freeing up another USB slot and also enabling me to easily reflash the BIOS, something USB connections don't allow.
I'm so pleased with the ioMega drive, I expect to add another.

How is that possible? The bottleneck for hard drives is not the interface but the hard drive spin etc. If this is the case then how the drive handles the usb2 interface is not efficient, and that's the drive's problem not usb's.

To the original thread starter: I also believe external drive is the way to go because it's very convenient. I don't think iomega is a good deal (expensive). Get an external enclosure for USB2/Firewire/SATA and purchase the drive separately. You'd be able to buy very reliable drives (like the new Western Digital RAID edition drives) at very competitive prices from zipzoomfly or other bargain stores. I have a FirmTek 1EN2 dual bay SATA enclosure, and I love it. It's very well ventilated (extremely important factor for enclosures) and high quality enclosure.

If you're careful and you watch for clearance models you can get a really good deal. TigerDirect had a promotion a while back for about 24Hours that they did with LaCie. I managed to get a 1TB external USB2 Drive that retailed for $900.00 for $140.00. The drive is brand new and it works perfectly. Just an FYI if you aren't in a real rush, it might behoove you to wait for a deal.

He doesn't want external storage.

Any PCI RAID card should allow you to add more drives, most won't require you to RAID the drives.

Make sure you chose the right PCI variant, SATA or PATA IDE, for the additional drives you want.

Kristian

You can get a PCI IDE Card to add some more ATA ports, for an example see here http://www.verbatim.com.au/products.cfm?productID=KW571A

You could spend 200-250€ on an external 250gb drive...
Or you could spend 200-250€ on two internal 250gb drives and ditch the 120s or put them in an old PC and run your weekly backup on them via ethernet or buy external enclosures for them the next time you run out of space or sell them on ebay (make sure to properly wipe them).

In the latter case you will benefit from the considerably higher performance of the current generation of hdds. They may also produce more heat than your old ones. Imo the extra cost of external storage is only worth it if you need the mobility, or an internal upgrade would be a hassle or is limited (for example in laptops).

edit: 250gb is just an example. You could of course go up to 400gb, but 250gb is the current sweetspot of gb/buck.

You can get PCI controllers for like 15 bucks on newegg. I grabbed one last year for my file server. Now I have ports for 12 IDE drives

Thanks the all the replies.

A lot of people have suggested external enclosures. The reason why I don't want external enclosures is because I already have too many things coming out from the back of my pc and I really don't need anymore things like that. I mean its a cable jungle back there...

I do however like the sound of these sata pci cards, So I will be looking into these. Another question I have is that I have a 350w power supply in my pc, if I add another 2 hard drives using a pci card, that will mean I have 4 hard drives. Will this power supply be enough to handle 4 hard drives?

Hard drives running off of this pci card, can windows boot up from them?

And yes, I have a case which has space for over 6 hard drives.

Gecko, I like all those ideas, just not sure which 1 is better yet.

Ax

It's impossible to predict anything by that number with any certainty. Power supply ratings are often very inaccurate. (A 250W PSU by brand X can be more powerful than a 450W PSU by brand Z.) You might run into trouble with this, but it depends upon your overall system specs and the quality of the PSU. If you do upgrade your PSU, don't just go by the advertized rating, make sure to research and invest in a good quality /brand/ unit.

Maybe. The hard part of having several drives is the fact that they all use a large amount of power when you first turn them on. So there's this big power spike at boot up. Keeping them going takes very little power by comparison.

Some controllers allow you to vary the timing of the startup sequence to eliminate this instant load problem. But those tend to be expensive, or SCSI.


Depends on the motherboard. On most I've seen that only have onboard IDE, either it can't be done at all, or you have to disable the onboard IDE to boot from PCI interfaces. The most likely answer, therefore, is "no", but this may not be the case with your particular mobo.

Another option that might be worth considering is simply to get a new mobo. I recently built a new system, and the motherboard has, built in mind you, support for 4 IDE drives and 8 SATA drives. I was shocked, naturally. It's an Asus A8N board, very nice.

Edit: BTW, what's taking up the other two devices on your IDE chain? I've never seen a mobo with only one IDE connector. I can see you having two hard drives and a CD/DVD drive on the other, but what's the fourth space being used for?

Edit2: Also, if you do get a PCI card, get one with RAID capability. It's usually not any more expensive, and these are generally nicer cards. You don't need to do RAID on these usually. Look for the "JBOD" option.. This means "just a bunch of disks" and is basically what you use to turn off RAID on them.

Hard drives are using +5V & +12V lines, first for electronics and the latter for motor I guess. AFAIK every single hard drive won't produce higher load than 1.5A on the +5V line & 3A on the +12V line, so it will drain 7.5W + 36W = ~45W, two additional drives will drain ~90W more from your PSU, all four hard drives will want in the worst case ~180W from your PSU, most of it (~144W) from the +12V line. So you want a PSU with high amperage on the +12V line(s).

Not usually. Modern PSUs include SATA compliant power connectors. As for Firewire vs. USB2, unless you're talking cached data the hard drive won't achieve anywhere near enough data throughput to saturate either. A Raptor might manage to achieve a sustained data rate of slightly over the USB2 transfer rate but most hard drives wouldn't come close.

I totally second that. I've got a cheap 250W Morex one still, it feels it's more like a 350W one. I used that one with my good old Althon t-bird and 6 hard drives, and never had stability issues.
By the way, hard-drives are not really power hungry. As far as I can remember it should be about 20W/drive.

I repeat that the Iomega hard drive is optimized for Firewire 800. A CNet review showed that conclusively and my own trial using it with USB 2.0 corroborated that. In fact, using USB 2.0, the Iomega is slower than the Maxtor One Touch.
Which part of faster/slower don't you understand?

Few things.

1) You can't optimize a drive for an external interface. The inside of the external enclosure is just an ATA to Firewire bridge chip. Theres nothing to optimize for since the drive and firewire controller can't even talk to each other.

However I dug up that review since your post didn't make sense, and thats not actually what it says. Rather they say the USB2 performance was extremely poor with very large files, presumably due to a bug in the firmware or their "informal" (and completely unspeced) test machine. It could also be that they used OSX, which is known to have extremely poor transfer rates over USB2.

2) The absolute highest speed you'll get out of a 7200 drive is about 60MB/s. This is actually above what you'll push through USB2. However its deceptive. You'll never hit remotely close to that under anything but sequential reads (and then only to the innermost part of the disk). Very few people do things that are limited by sequential read speed, and your own observations of which felt faster were almost certainly latency bound.

So saying things like "hard drive X is faster then Y due to interface Z" is silly, since the limit is always the mechanics of the drive and not the interface, which is why people are questioning your post. If you want to learn about hard drives and how to accurately judge performance of them, I recommend storagereview.com

Thanks Defsac.

So to confirm, if you still want to go the SATA route, you will need:

• SATA hard drive
• SATA PCI card
• Molex to SATA power converter
• SATA data cable

It would seem to make sense to buy a SATA PCI card with at least two internal connectors, and I would go for one with one or two external as well - so you have the option of external hard drives at a later date.


Hmmm... I may have to rethink my external hard drive strategy. My current idea is to get a 250GB PATA Maxtor MaxLine III and an IcyBox caddy with USB2 and Firewire interface (as I don't have USB2 at the moment, and they only do PATA-Firewire, not SATA-Firewire).

I have no more bays in the PC (its a few years old now and I've pretty much got everything jam packed - I'll have to remove a fan's PCI card to free up a slot!)

Would anyone suggest a SATA PCI card with external SATA hard drive (IcyBox do a SATA-SATA caddy as well) over a USB2/Firewire? From what little I've read the SATA takes less power and is less prone to interference.

This is going to be my lossless file archive, so I need to trust it.

Thanks.

Western Digital SATA drives have both the molex and the regular SATA power connectors, so take your pick. If you have the means, why not upgrade to a modern motherboard? Some have 8 SATA ports plus your regular IDE connectors. MSI's Neo4-F Platinum has worked well for me so far.
While you're at it, pick up an Antec Sonata case. It's quiet, and the PSU is a few solid notches above generic PSU crap. When you've got 8 hard drives inside, it helps to have everything rubber mounted and at least one nice 12cm fan keeping your precious drives cool.

Overall, this case is one of the better ones out there. But, the front opening door broke at the hinge (poor design, maybe this has since been addressed) and the PSU literally blew up.

Thanks for the info, but on checking I think I will be sticking with the PATA External Firewire connection.

A SATA PCI card is just adding more money to the solution that I don't have.

I think I'll have to wait until this PC blows, so I can get a new mobo with SATA onboard.

there are so many uncertanties currently. for example

will my motherboard handle booting from the sata adapter
will my ide hard drives boot if the sata adapter is installed
will my psu handle 4 hard drives + 2 optical drives + all other components
will have to buy sata cables and sata powercable adapters

might have to rething this again.

Why don't you buy an ata 133 controller card? The speed gain with SATA is minimal and it will surely be cheaper.

I think you are right! I should.

So I've decided to get the following, tell me what you think:

---------------------------------
Desciption: Y Splitter Cable x2
URL: http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/in...oduct_uid=64273
Quick Find Code: 64273
---------------------------------
Desciption: PCI ATA133 RAID Controller Card W/Cable
URL: http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/in...oduct_uid=60610
Quick Find Code: 60610
---------------------------------
Desciption: Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250gb, Ata100 3.5lp 8ms 7200rpm 8mb x2
URL: http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/in...oduct_uid=81595
Quick Find Code: 81595
---------------------------------
TOTAL: [exchange rate from www.xe.com - correct on 27/08/05]
£171.75 GBP
€251.54 EUR
$309.20 USD
$370.98 CAD

I think this card only comes with 1 cable so I will need to buy another, but reading from the description I think I can actually get 2 splitters allowing a total of 4 hard drives to run off this card. Is this correct?

I was wrong about my PSU its a 300w version of this:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=46722&doy=27m8

Find out here.

I have the Sonata II case, they probably still sell the regular first-gen design tho. The PSU is beefier (450 watt) and the front flap is double-hinged, so it can bend back around the case body all the way. On the original case, I just took the flap entirely off





I found them about the same price, and why bother with IDE crap when you don't have to? SATA cables are much tinier, promoting better airflow. Plus SATA drives are a bit quicker, and possibly quite a bit quicker because there's no master/slave priority - each drive gets its own controller, so there's no waiting for the higher priority device to finish.