How many IDE Hdd's can fit on one pc ??

[billmckinstry]

Hi Forum, While "playing" with replacing an IDE Hdd it appears there is a limit on the number of IDE devices that can be attached.
There are two cables. One has two Hdd's and the other an Hdd & DVD.

Is it possible or even desirable to attach any more ?? With the operating system, IDE are the easiest to install but if the limit is only 4 devices (3 x Hdd if 1 DVD is incl) then it does limit options.

Appreciate any guidence here as once the present project is completed we will have 2 x 80gb & 2 x 160gb Hdds and this appears to be a given for 1 x 80gb root & 1 x 160gb home & data with the other 80gb & 160gb to be the respective backups. if this is so... back to the cable restriction of only 3 x IDE Hdds.
Regards, Bill

[Roxoff]

Until recently in my server, I had two IDE connections on the main board plus two UDMA133 controller cards in PCI slots, giving two more IDE connections per card. This gave me a theoretical maximum of 12 devices. In practice I only(!) had five hard disks, two optical drives and an ageing Zip drive.

Now, things are very different. I've removed the IDE cards and replaced them with one SATA card with two ports on it. The 1TB drive on the sata connector replaces _all_ the others... If you were going to put a lot of disk space in your computer, I'd strongly suggest you go for this kind of arrangement, IDE is slower than SATA, and you'd be freeing yourself up for bigger capacity disks later on.

[billmckinstry]

Thanks Roxoff, Looks like the only way to get the 4th IDE installed is to add an expansion card - additional cost and may not be plug & play for ClarkConnect 4.1 (bassed on RH4).
There are SATA ports available now but a SATA drive is not recognised and my basic (very) skill suggests stay with IDE until we upgrade to RH5 that should resolve the SATA issue. For now it may be better to keep with IDE and poss install a 200gb should one of the 80gb fail.
Our data is not that big and in time 2 x 500gb SATA will allow good capacity & full backup. We have a new pc with SATA Hdd & SATA DVD plus usb ext Hdd all readily accepted by Mandriva 2008 but not CC4.1 (RH4). Regards, Bill

[Roxoff]

... only way to get the 4th IDE installed is to add an expansion card - additional cost and may not be plug & play for ClarkConnect 4.1 (bassed on RH4).
...

Well I had my ide cards in my server running CentOS 4.x (also based on RH4) for ages, they needed no additional support. They weren't particularly expensive either IIRC.