My motherboard has only 2 IDE channels on it. They are both used up by my hard drive and CD-RW. If I wanted to add another hard drive or or drive how would I connect it?
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My motherboard has only 2 IDE channels on it. They are both used up by my hard drive and CD-RW. If I wanted to add another hard drive or or drive how would I connect it?
Don`t your ide cables have two connectors on them. Edit to add not including the connector that connects to the MB.
Even though you only have two ide channels, each channel has a master and a slave. You connect additional drives by setting one drive's jumper to master, and one drive's jumper to slave, and then you daisy-chain the drives together with an ide cable with two connectors on it.
or go with a RAID setup to get more HDDs in, but I think, based on your question, you should follow what was said in the prior replies.
you should have two IDEs, one primary, the other secondary; both cables should have 3 connectors, one goes to the motherboard (the one farthest away on the cable) and the other two can connect to drives. The connector on the very end is the master and the other connector in between is the slave.
When connecting the drives, make sure you set each drive jumper correctly, either master or slave.
In addition to the above post, most devices these days also have a cable-select option as well. This CS option maps the primary and slave drives according to their position on the cable - the middle connector normally being the slave...
-Ryan