how many more internal hard drives can i connect to my motherboard?

Question

I have a intel 865PERL motherboard that has a hard drive, dvd-rom, cd writer, and a dvd writer in my 3 bays and a floppy drive in a small bay

Answer 1

from the specs of your motherboard, i think you can connect only one more IDE or SATA drive. take a look at the specs below. you are equipped with 1 SATA and 1 IDE port on the MB. That means you can have only one more disk (either IDE or SATA), since you already have 3 devices connected.

......edit edit.....
it seems the specs stated on the site and as shown on the image are not the same. the website states 2 SATA and 2 IDE ports. That means you can have upto 8 drives. So you can attach around 5 more. Plenty of space on the motherboard. You might have to upgrade your cabinet though.
......edit edit.....

Answer 2

A typical motherboard for a normal user has 2 IDE connectors. This are the connectors where you connect the cables that go from your IDE devices (CD-ROMs, CD-RW, Hard Drives) to your motherboard.

On these cables you can have a primary and a secondary device. This means that on a typical motherboard you can only have 4 devices total (4 hard drives, 2 hard drives a CD-ROM and a DVD Drive).

You can purchase a card that contains additional IDE connectors. If you purchase a card that has 2 IDE connectors then you will be able to have 4 additional devices.

Answer 3

Do you have a SATA hard drive installed? On this board you can install 2 SATA HDD's. You can also install up to 4 PATA IDE drives on this mobo. For a total of 6. Now, you can get PCI cards that will also allow for more drives installed in a RAID. Another question that I had, why do you have 3 optical drives? Did you consider an DVD/CD Combo drive to replace the other two? If you want to use 2 PATA IDE HDD's hooked directly to the mobo and not thorugh a PCI card, one of the optical drives will have to go! Your best bet would probably be to use a PCI card if you want to keep all of your optical drives.

Answer 4

The size of your computer case doesn't determine how many internal drives you can hook up, it's your motherboard. You can check out your motherboard specs here: http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d865perl/index.htm

According to the specs (scroll down the page to the table, and go to the row "peripheral interfaces"), it has two Parallel ATA (PATA) connections & 2 Serial ATA (SATA) connections. Each PATA can support two devices (CD & DVD drives and hard drives) & Each SATA can support one hard drive.

Since you have 3 optical drives & one hard disk, your PATA connections are full. However, you can still connect up to 2 SATA hard disks. That's where you want to upgrade.

Floppy disks connect to a separate floppy disk controller on the motherboard

hope this helps

Answer 5

It really depends upon your case. Like another answerer said, you can have more capacity than you have room in your box. For every IDE controller you have, 2 in this case, you can have 2 drives per controller, for a max of 4. That includes your 5.25 bays and any internal PATA drives you have. For every SATA controller you have, you can have 1 driver per controller, for another 2 SATA Drives.

Also, if you have USB ports, you can always connect almost any type of drive (PATA, SATA, Notebook) via an EXTERNAL ENCLOSURE, so you can actually connect a ridiculous amount of harddisks to your box if you absolutely must. USB supports 144 different items per port, so as long as you have hubs, you can keep chaining them together to add as many as you need. Hope that helps.

Answer 6

Coming from a man that has 4 RAID arrays in one system, it depends on space and controllers.
If say the mobo supports 4, ok, 4.
Then add a PROMISE controller, another 4 IDE at 133
Then add SCSI controllers...if wide, 15 drives each, if not , 7 each. You may have multiple controllers in a single system
basically, you can have more drives than your case can handle.
8*7=56 drive alone if you go only SCSI. 8*15=120 drives if you go SCSI Wide.
THEN on top of that you can add the IDE drives, including those on promise controllers. And on some mobo's you can add a couple SATA too.
max 8 controllers per system. 7 drives per on scsi , 15 on wide.
food for thought.
Tell me what you need to do, and I can advise you
[e-mail]

Answer 7

Usually a total of 4 ide drives on older motherboards... You can always buy an add on card to add more drives. Newer motherboards offer both ide and sata for an average of 6 drives. Please note that cd/dvds will also count toward your total. A great place to buy new drives and external enclosures is at:

http://gamegiants.net/index.php?cPath=1_15

Answer 8

in some circumstances there'll rigidity letter conflict, so which you should assign a rigidity letter for the hot perplexing rigidity. flow to Disk Managment application gadget modern in controla panel-----administrative procedures. From there you are able to particularly comprehend which drives are related on your motherboard.

Answer 9

The specs for your board are as follows:
The board provides four IDE interface connectors:
•Two Parallel ATA IDE connectors, which support a total of four devices (two per connector)
•Two Serial ATA IDE connectors, which support one drive per connector
This means you can have 6 IDE devices (harddrives, cdrom, dvd. etc.)
If you know what you are doing and can afford it, you can use a raid array. Your board supports RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Answer 10

depends on how much space is in the computer if u are uilding 1 then u can get bigger towers that can hold more if it one u bought from the store u can install 1 more as a secondary internal hard drive.