How do I mount more than 2 HDD in my PC?

Question

I have been told about installing a SCSI board and also going to RAID. Is there a simple way of having 5 HDDs on-line?

Answer 1

SCSI is old. Don't bother.

Most new PCs motherboards have SATA ports which can be set up for RAID for up to 4 HDDs. If you want 5 hard drives it is possible, but you can only RAID four of them since each RAID array must work in pairs of identical drives (same drive model and capacity). The 5th drive will still work as storage, it just won't function as part of a RAID setup.

The advantage to a RAID is in stripe mode, you can get faster performance and in mirror mode, it will keep a backup of your data for better reliability.

If neither of the above matter, then you don't need to RAID them. Just get a motherboard that either has 4 SATA ports and 1 IDE (of course it won't be as fast but still works), or get one with more than 4 SATA ports if you want to hook up 5 SATA drives. You can also hook up 4 SATA drives and just add on a USB or Firewire external hard drive, but you will be limited to slower transfer rates for the external and paying more for the external drive than just putting another internal in as the fifth.

If you want to do this with an old IDE based PC, then you probably want to upgrade. With SATA II drives out that sell for the same price as IDE, the transfer speed benefit is worth the cost of upgrading if this is what you intend to do. Also IDE is almost dead so consider this if you plan to do any upgrades in the future.

Answer 2

SCSI can be beautiful and it works on almost every platform I've used including PCs, Apples, and Unixes.

If you're going to go RAID with SCSI, this can be done relatively simply if you employ RAID 3 or RAID 5 that allows spreading redundant information and parity data across your hard disks.

If you have 5 HDDs that are the same size, then this makes it easy to have 3 or 4 HDDs in a RAID set, plus 2 or 1 spares that can physically swap places with a SCSI drive that fails. Some SCSI adaptors even allow you to have them all going at once so recovering from a failure can be performed immediately (in lights out operation).

Make sure you read the manuals that come with the SCSI board so that you can consider your options and configure the available drives wisely.

Good luck.

Answer 3

The real question is why do you want five hard drives? If you already own the drives and they're IDE or SATA then putting one or more of them in a USB enclosure could be an answer. If you already own the drives and they're SCSI, then you probably wouldn't be asking this question.

Typically, a motherboard can support up to four IDE/EIDE or SATA drives. An add-in controller might get around that limitation, but the real answer is in the details. What kind of drive, what kind of motherboard, etc.

If you have a software driven reason, then is there a reason they need to be five distinct hard drives as opposed to five drive letters (i.e. partitions) on one or more HD?

Answer 4

There are many ways - does your computer case physically hold that many drives? If so, you can just buy a controller card for $20 or less and use that to add 4 drives in addition to the one the computer currently likely has.

Answer 5

its going to depend on your motherboard and how many devices it will allow. you can get a cable to go from your primary IDE. that has 2 or 3 connectors and also the same for the secondary IDE, but you will have to set your drives for slave and cable select. each harddrive will have to be formatted to accept the file format that you are running on your system. but you can do it.

Answer 6

put 6 usb hard drives on

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?keywords=usb+hard+drive&image1.x=14&image1.y=8