need a second hard drive

yelowee

Hi I hope someone here can help me, I have a compaq sr5109uk, and need to add a second HDD the problem I have is that looking at the motherboard it seems I only have 2 SATA ports, both of which are in use, by the dvd drive and first HDD, what options are open to me? I would rather not replace the first one completely as I have a second drive already which just wouldn't be big enough on its own as it's only a little bigger than the original one, and would cause problems retrieving the data from the one in use now. If I had to replace it completely can I temporarily use the sata from the dvd drive to connect both hdds at the same time to transfer data onto the new hdd prior to removing the original all together? or is there a way to add another sata port? Any help or ideas would be much appreciated thanks.

DCFC79

Do you have an ide slot on your board ? could not buy an ide hard drive, ide cable and a thing for your psu to connect the psu to the hard drive (a molex thing but it depends on the connectors on your psu)

Garetha

Yes! you can use the DVD SATA leads as a temporary lash-up

not sure about other question

busenbust

Another option would be an external e-Sata drive but might not be fast or efficient enough for your needs.

yelowee

Yes (I think) it has an IDE slot, I was hoping just to use the drive I have though which is SATA, if I were to need to buy a new one I would probably get a large SATA and just replace the original. I was just looking on ebay and wondered if this - http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280414578300&fromMakeTrack=true&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:top:en - would do the job? I'd much rather pay the £5 for this than buy a new hard drive, but while no technophobe I have know idea what I'm doing here!

I also noticed that on my motherboard I have 2 empty spaces that are marked SATA 3 and 4, the ports just aren't there, this adding to my wondering if it would be possible to add a SATA port or two with a soldering iron?

AHAR

That card should do the job provided you've got a free PCI slot. I notice it only has a 1.5Gbps SATA interface which is half the speed of current drives but still shouldn't be a bottleneck. On some drives you need to set a jumper to restrict it to 1.5Gbps operation. Other drives should automatically sense the correct interface speed. Which hard drive have you got?

Edit: If you wanted to ensure the best possible performance or if you had any problems using the 2nd hard drive with that card you could connect the 2nd hard drive to the motherboard and move your DVD drive to that add-in card but it looks like that card isn't bootable so with that arrangement you wouldn't be able to start the computer from a bootable CD/DVD should you need to.

JasX

IDE is pretty outdated now, if you get an IDE drive it'll be slower to access and a fair bit more expensive per GB than a SATA one.

if you have spare slots (PCI or PCIe -check which b4 buying) you should be able to pick up an i/o type card to give you extra SATA slots.

other options include getting an external USB2 drive and using that separately, or you could get some network attached storage but if you don't need space to share between computers probably more hassle than necessary.

if it were me and you don't need to shuffle big files around regularly i'd be tempted to get a TB or 1.5 desktop mains drive