Adding a third CD drive

[Guest]

I'm trying to add a third disk drive to my computer. My
system has two 160GB Hard Drives attached to the primary
IDE slot on an Ultra ATA controller PCI card, and a CD-RW
Drive (master) and a DVD-ROM drive (Slave) attached to the
mobo's primary IDE slot. How should I add in a DVD-RW
drive? Are there any inherent issues with having more than
two optical drives?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I'm trying to add a third disk drive to my computer. My
system has two 160GB Hard Drives attached to the primary
IDE slot on an Ultra ATA controller PCI card, and a CD-RW
Drive (master) and a DVD-ROM drive (Slave) attached to the
mobo's primary IDE slot. How should I add in a DVD-RW
drive? Are there any inherent issues with having more than
two optical drives?

Standard PCs have a limit of 4 IDE devices. You could either
buy a SCSI CD drive (plus a SCSI adapter), or an IDE adapter
that lets you connect additional drives. I have only heard of the
latter but never tried any.

 

[Colon Terminus]

I'm trying to add a third disk drive to my computer. My
system has two 160GB Hard Drives attached to the primary
IDE slot on an Ultra ATA controller PCI card, and a CD-RW
Drive (master) and a DVD-ROM drive (Slave) attached to the
mobo's primary IDE slot. How should I add in a DVD-RW
drive? Are there any inherent issues with having more than
two optical drives?

Shouldn't be a problem.
Add the DVD-RW as master (or slave, if you prefer) on IDE2.

My main computer has 3 optical drives and 5 200GB hard disks.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Shouldn't be a problem.
Add the DVD-RW as master (or slave, if you prefer) on IDE2.

My main computer has 3 optical drives and 5 200GB hard disks.

Count again:

- IDE Device 1: 160 GByte HDD
- IDE Device 2: 160 GByte HDD
- IDE Device 3: CD-RW
- IDE Device 4: DVD ROM

Which master or slave were you thinking of for the third CD drive?

 

[Dan Seur]

If I'm counting correctly (and you have 2 standard motherboard IDE slots
and 2 standard PCI-card IDE slots, you can attach up to 8 devices.

You say you currently have 2 HDDs and 2 optical drives. You should
therefore have no problem adding up to 4 more drives of either kind.

Given that, exactly how you attach the drives is another story and
depends (for performance' sake) on what you use the devices for.

For example, if you do a great deal of CDRW writing from a particular
drive, it's best to have the source drive and the target drive on
different IDE controllers, to reduce or eliminate resource contention
(waiting) on a single IDE controller bus. This situation is something
only you can know.

In the CDRW software I use, writing hiccups can occur if the "write
buffer" is emptied prematurely during a write operation - and this can
occur if bus contention makes keeping the write buffer full impossible.
This can happen with highspeed CD writers that empty that buffer so
quickly it cannot be refilled in time. Your device manuals will probably
mention this.

 

[Colon Terminus]

Count again:

- IDE Device 1: 160 GByte HDD
- IDE Device 2: 160 GByte HDD
- IDE Device 3: CD-RW
- IDE Device 4: DVD ROM

Which master or slave were you thinking of for the third CD drive?

Uhm, the OP stated that the hard disks were attached to a PCI
controller, ergo he has at least 3 IDE controllers ... possibly 4.