3 Hard Drives w/o raid?

[solrium]

I need to install a Novell server, long story short - all the techs
have to be certified by december if we want to keep our client.

I have a broken PC: needs power supply, mobo, 1 stick o' ram (256) and
an IDE HD.
I have a working PC: p4 3.8, 1gb ram, gforce 256, etc

The working PC has TWO hard drives: a S-ATA hard drivem and the IDE
hard drive from the old computer... one has windows xp home, the other
one is blank and used as a storage device. Both hard drives are full,
and no I can't spare space by deleting files.

What would be the cheapest/fastest/easiest way to get one of the two up
and running ?


-- as the subject says, I'm thinking about 3 HDs on the working PC.

There is a slot on the S-ATA to get a second HD hooked up.
Is this possible? Any info someone could give on this? Not very
hardware inclined.

Thanks

 

[Mike T.]

I need to install a Novell server, long story short - all the techs
have to be certified by december if we want to keep our client.

I have a broken PC: needs power supply, mobo, 1 stick o' ram (256) and
an IDE HD.
I have a working PC: p4 3.8, 1gb ram, gforce 256, etc

The working PC has TWO hard drives: a S-ATA hard drivem and the IDE
hard drive from the old computer... one has windows xp home, the other
one is blank and used as a storage device. Both hard drives are full,
and no I can't spare space by deleting files.

What would be the cheapest/fastest/easiest way to get one of the two up
and running ?


-- as the subject says, I'm thinking about 3 HDs on the working PC.

There is a slot on the S-ATA to get a second HD hooked up.
Is this possible? Any info someone could give on this? Not very
hardware inclined.

Thanks

I think your best solution would be to add another IDE hard drive, unless
you've already got FOUR IDE devices on that system. SATA would work also,
but the insall will be a little more complicated (not bad). For one thing,
the SATA drives often use a different power connector, so you'd have to be
sure that you have the right cables (data and power) for it. But it's
likely that you've got spare molex (power) connectors for an IDE hard drive
on your power supply already. It's also somewhat likely that you've got a
spare IDE data connector in the system somewhere. If not, you can buy a new
3-connector IDE cable for about 5 bucks. This will allow you to put two IDE
hard drives on the same cable.

There's no problem running 3 hard drives on one system. I was just working
with a system that booted from IDE hard drive, but had other IDE hard
drives, a SCSI hard drive and a SATA hard drive, also. That's ignoring a
couple of removable IDE hard drives on the same system. You are generally
limited to 4 IDE devices (including optical drives). Other than that, the
only limits are physical space in the computer case to mount the hard
drives, and sometimes you might need to upgrade the power supply if you get
too crazy about adding extra drives. But adding ONE extra hard drive should
be no problem, as far as the power supply goes. -Dave