It's a good solution, just make sure you get a fast Audio/Video drive with at least 80GB of space & 8MB cache. (Maxtor diamond MAX 9 7200 8MB cache will do, check for Western Digital too)Also make sure you connect it as a MASTER drive, as it needs to be the fastest drive in your computer. Cheers !

Thanks for the response! Is it ok to mix Brands of Hard Drives???

Originally posted by munkee:
Thanks for the response! Is it ok to mix Brands of Hard Drives???

Unless you are setting them up as a RAID you should be fine.

Usually, the latest model drive is Master in a two-drive arrangement.

A 3rd drive makes perfect sense, if you can live without two CD devices on the second IDE channel. Making the 3rd drive a FAT32 volume leaves it open to making GHOST images of the system volume.

You can write GHOST images to an NTFS volume using the NTFSDOS device drivers for DOS. This is an expensive and very slow process compared to writing directly to FAT32.

I already have 2 CD drives. A DVD drive and a HP CDR drive. So having a third drive would make me get rid of one of 1 of the CD drives???

You can connect up to 4 IDE devices to your two IDE ports on your motherboard (2 each). This could be 4 hard disk, 4 CD drives (doesn't make sense, I know) or any combination in between. So if you already have 2 HD's and 2 CD/DVD drives and you want to add one more HD then one CD/DVD has to go ...

Unless, of course, you don't mind adding another PCI-to-IDE/UDMA card. This would give you the possibility to connect another 4 IDE devices (for a total of 8). These cards are actually rather inexpensive. I just got a 160GB Western Digital disk that came with a UDMA card in the package. The performance is stellar... 40% faster than my next fastest HD which is no slouch either.

Hope this helps,

MisterBlue.

HeadsUp on adding a PCI controller card. All that traffic runs down the PCI bus; the same bus that handles your audio (assuming you have a PCI sound card).

Another solution is native support for 4 IDE controllers which some mobos offer. Or SATA (again, native support is important since some mobos have SATA connectors but they use a bridge to the PCI bus.. not good) drives. Or USB/firewire. Anything to keep that disk traffic away from the PCI bus.

tj

Would this be raid that can function merely as extra ide ports? Can all raid ports do this? How about a short list of DAW friendly boards that support this... :) or... maybe explain how to determine if a particular board will let me have more than 4 devices without configuring an array? What do I look for? What will the specs say?

I'm one who's been using a 3 HD setup for a while now, 2 IDE HD's & 1 SCSI HD. No problems here. I know that SCSI is'nt widely supported anymore but that has not persuaded me from using the medium. Excellent performance.

Originally posted by jonahsarc:
Would this be raid that can function merely as extra ide ports? Can all raid ports do this? How about a short list of DAW friendly boards that support this... :) or... maybe explain how to determine if a particular board will let me have more than 4 devices without configuring an array? What do I look for? What will the specs say?

jonahsarc,

Little bit of confusion here.

A RAID exists as a combination of drives, of some manner. The way some mobos handle RAID is by providing a chip which will control access to the disks attached to the onboard IDE controllers given that RAID is enabled. There is no such thing as a RAID port. Therefore, if we're talking IDE RAID, the 2 device per channel limitation still exists. So two channels = 4 devices, which may or may not be RAIDed together.

Of course a mobo is not limited to two IDE channels. That's what you need to look for in order to escape the 4 device limit. Or you could get a PCI IDE controller instead, as mentioned before.

Now for SCSI RAID mobos, one channel can handle up to 15 devices at a time. But you need SCSI drives (very expensive proposition).

mitz