Member Avatar for Kwak

You have your primary harddrive that has the OS installed on it.
You have a second hard drive.
And you want to add a 3rd hard drive.

How do you add the 3rd one when the cable only allows 2?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rcrevolution

Dani AI

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This thread highlights a common constraint of older PC wiring: a single PATA/IDE ribbon supports only two drives, so a third internal drive requires another port. Common, practical options are: move a drive to a free IDE channel (if one exists), add a PCI storage controller (IDE or, preferably, SATA) — which reported worked — or use an external USB/FireWire enclosure as suggested for non‑boot storage.

Practical steps for adding an internal drive:

  1. Confirm available headers on the motherboard (second IDE channel or spare SATA port).
  2. If using the second IDE channel, set drive jumpers correctly (one master, one slave) or use cable‑select with an 80‑conductor cable only if the cable and both drives support it.
  3. If adding a PCI controller: pick a card with drivers for the intended OS and (if booting from it) BIOS/boot support; power down, seat the card in a free PCI slot, connect the drive(s) and PSU power (SATA power or Molex), boot and install drivers.
  4. After hardware is visible to the BIOS/UEFI, initialize/partition/format the new drive with the OS disk utility.

On mixing ATA/133 and SATA/150 (answering ): they can run together. PATA and SATA use separate controllers and do not force each other to a common speed. Caveats: add‑in controllers that live on the PCI bus can be bandwidth‑limited compared with native ports, and older OS installers or BIOSes sometimes require vendor drivers or BIOS support to boot from a non‑native controller.

Troubleshooting and cautions: always power down and observe ESD precautions; ensure the PSU has spare power leads; if a drive isn’t detected check power, cable/jumper settings, BIOS/UEFI device list and controller enablement, try different ports or a different PCI slot, update drivers/firmware, and then initialize the disk in the OS. For best performance, avoid putting heavily used drives on the same PATA ribbon; prefer native SATA ports or a quality add‑in controller for heavy I/O.

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Member Avatar for mikeandike22

get an external hard drive connected via firewire or usb it would be a little slower than a normal internal hard drive but you will get what you want.

Member Avatar for Kwak

Hehe, thanks for the alternative suggestion. I did get the support I needed, which was to add a pci card to add additional hard drives.
The external drive does sound like a good idea.

Member Avatar for suRoot

could get pci controller, or if you have sata? or you could put it on the second ide channel

Member Avatar for rcrevolution

can you run ata/133 and sata/150 at the same time in one system? the sata as a primary and the ata/133 as the secondary? I have a 200Gb sata HDD, but my life is so busy now with christmas coming up and all i cant install it

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