I saw, or heard, somewhere that there's a PCI card that lets you have more than the regular up to four physical drives.
What do you call that?
Where would the IDE Cables go? (I guess to the card)
Where would you connect the power supply? (since I counted in mine, you only get four for the drives)
would this be more efficient than having one massive hard drive? I'm thinking maybe since one time my salve hard drive died and now all those pictures and stuff I downloaded are gone forever...
2007-03-01 15:07:30 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
There are PCI cards available for both PATA and SATA drives. I have a Promise PCI card for PATA drives. It will allow only 4 drives (primary, secondary..each with master and slave). You could install another PCI card for an additional 4 drives if you wanted.
Now if you are trying to duplicate a drive to protect against failure (RAID), then you can configure the card differently, but you must have two identical drives for the RAID to work properly in this instance.
2007-03-01 15:41:27 · answer #1 · answered by Wyoming Rider 6 · 1⤊ 1⤋
Yeah it sounds like you would want to run a raid array in your case. If you were looking just for extra connection points to run many hard drives then this would work. But you got to copy data over manually http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816132005
Raid can get expensive fast and there are many options, speeds, SATA, ATA, software based, hardware based, RAID 0,1,5 etc. A card that does RAID 1 or mirroring might be your best bet.
I do my data backups just using an external drive. Then the drive is hidden in the attic as my neighbor's were burglarized, and there went the PC, photos and all. Didn't matter if you had raid in that case. I may also set up a CD to burn each day and add only changed files to it.
2007-03-01 16:13:34 · answer #2 · answered by Robert H 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
You can buy a RAID controller card to do this. You get the functionality of more hard drivers, and in many different RAID configurations. One can spread data out on the hard drives to achieve better read speeds, other options will duplicate the data on multiple drives to protect from one failing drive. And there are combinations of those two settings, but may require more hard drives to implement.
2007-03-01 15:26:27 · answer #3 · answered by shadowkat 5 · 0⤊ 1⤋
That kind of card has ports for SATA cables. It would be better if you had one massive HD because then you would use less power. If you dont have any power cables left for the additional one i would suugest taking oout 1 or 2 drives and adding i masive one.
2007-03-01 15:16:22 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
4 is mroe efficient than oone but you do risk losing one and part of your information.
but my suggestion for backing stuff up, use AOL XDrive, its free and 5 GB
2007-03-01 15:36:52 · answer #5 · answered by The Original Byron 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋