Adding a third hard drive

alandoc

I want to add a third hard drive to my PC. Is it possible? What do I need (other than a new hard drive?)

MercilessKiller

You have a few things to consider here

2 Main types of drive. Internal and External.

Internal:
This includes SATA (if your motherboard supports it, usually up to 4 drives).. or standard IDE. If IDE you prob currently have a cable which plugs into one IDE socket yet links to 2 hard drives (or one cable for each drive yet one spare connector on each cable).

The motherboard (unless ancienct) would support up to 4 IDE Hard Drives as standard (2 IDE Channels...). As long as you have a spare IDE cable if needed then the hard drive is all you need though make sure you set it to slave using the jumpers on the back of the drive.

EXTERNAL:

By far the easier option if going to be used for backups or files that you may need to transport (such as media). A USB or USB 2.0 Drive links using the USB port on your computer. I would advise no less than USB 2.0 (so long as your mohterboard supports it) due to speed of high capacity data transfer

Omertron

MercilessKiller wrote:

The motherboard (unless ancienct) would support up to 4 IDE Hard Drives as standard (2 IDE Channels...).

A lot of modern motherboards will only support two IDE devices now (mainly for CD/DVD drives) best to check before purchasing a new drive

Idiophreak

If you've used up all your IDE/SATA (ie if you have 2 cd drives and 2 hdds on IDE), you have a couple of options:

1) External HDD
2) Buy much larger second drive and copy stuff across then ebay the old one.
3) But a PCI / PCI-E sata card (used to be around a tenner from ebuyer for a PCI one iirc) and plug a new drive into that.

Sadly, however, it's not easy to give great guidance without knowing more about your current setup.