I'm pretty new to a lot of hardware stuff, and I was just wondering if it's possible to have 3 IDE harddrives, with no raid? I ask, because I'm running a FreeNAS box, and i have a 2 GB HD laying around that I'd like to install the OS on, instead of going out to buy another thumbdrive.
It can be done, as long as your motherboard has two IDE ports. Just don't expect to get good bandwidth when moving files between the CD-rom drive and the hard drive on the same cable.
Would this be how I set it up? Cable 1: CD Drive - Slave Boot Drive - Master Cable 2: Data Drive - Master Data Drive - Slave Right, does this make sense?
It makes sense, yes, but when you're installing your OS, it'll be moving data from your CD-ROM drive to your boot drive. With Windows, anyway, doing it like that would make the install take forever, because of bandwidth limitations. Also, having both of your data drives on the same cable will limit bandwidth when you're pulling data off both of them. I would suggest this: Cable 1 (primary IDE channel): Boot drive: Master. Data drive: Slave. Cable 2 (secondary IDE channel): CD drive: Master. Data drive: Slave. That way, you'll get full bandwidth from your CD-rom drive to your boot drive, and also full bandwidth when you're pulling data from your data drives.
the os will be installed from one of the other drives (it's freenas, it'll work), but i think having the data drives seperate would make sense.
Yay! It totally works with that setup (post number 4). And , after I finished I realized I can add another two drives by taking out my floppy drive, and if I remove the CD drive, that's another three! Sweet. Thanks again.
The floppy drive has a different connector from the IDE HDDs. Unless you were referring to physical space in the case being freed up?
Isn't there just a cross in the cable? If I plugged in a normal cable would it not react like any other IDE slot?