Question about adding hard drives

[The Rainman]

Here's the skinny,
I've got a full tower now..DVD Burner, CD Burner & 2 HD's both running in
removable drive trays(not hot swappable, but they don't really need to be).
I have all kinds of room in the box for adding drives, however, as normal,
the board only supports 4 on the two built in IDE channels. I went out and
bought a Promise Fasttrak 100 TX2 PCI add in controller card on the advice
of someone who told me that it would allow me to add an extra 4 drives to
the machine, totaling 8. Here's the question, after reading the book that
came with the card, and having no former experience with these cards, the
book makes it sound like I have to set up some kind of a raid array..either
striping or mirroring. I don't want to get into either..I'm simply looking
for away to add the HD's ( two are identical WD 120 gb's, ones a Samsung 80
GB and ones a Fujitsu 40GB. All are storage drives and are currently being
used through removable drive bays, but it gets tiresome shutting down the PC
to swap a drive. I don't need them to be bootable or anything..just need
them to work in a storage capacity. can I use this card as just a simple IDE
controller without setting up an array? I don't know anything about arrays
and maybe that is all I can do with one of these cards, and if it is, then
is there a simple add in card that is out there that will do what I want

Awaiting any help tossed my way

The Rainman

 

[J. Clarke]

Here's the skinny,
I've got a full tower now..DVD Burner, CD Burner & 2 HD's both running in
removable drive trays(not hot swappable, but they don't really need to
be). I have all kinds of room in the box for adding drives, however, as
normal, the board only supports 4 on the two built in IDE channels. I went
out and bought a Promise Fasttrak 100 TX2 PCI add in controller card on
the advice of someone who told me that it would allow me to add an extra 4
drives to the machine, totaling 8. Here's the question, after reading the
book that came with the card, and having no former experience with these
cards, the book makes it sound like I have to set up some kind of a raid
array..either striping or mirroring. I don't want to get into either..I'm
simply looking for away to add the HD's ( two are identical WD 120 gb's,
ones a Samsung 80 GB and ones a Fujitsu 40GB. All are storage drives and
are currently being used through removable drive bays, but it gets
tiresome shutting down the PC to swap a drive. I don't need them to be
bootable or anything..just need them to work in a storage capacity. can I
use this card as just a simple IDE controller without setting up an array?
I don't know anything about arrays and maybe that is all I can do with one
of these cards, and if it is, then is there a simple add in card that is
out there that will do what I want

Awaiting any help tossed my way

The FastTrack is a RAID board--if you don't want RAID you could have saved
40 bucks or so by getting one of the Promise boards that doesn't support
RAID--if you can exchange it then that would be the best thing to do. The
workaround is to create 4 arrays of 1 drive each if it will let you do
that, or set it for "JBOD" mode if that's an option--been a while since I
fiddled with one of those.

 

[omega man]

Short answer...Yes..no problem using them as separate drives

But there is no way in hell your power supply will handle the additional
load, and even if you try it and it does I wouldn't be surprised to see
weird errors start cropping up.
Either upgrade your power supply or add a cheap second one just for the
additional drives...course then you gotta figure out where to put it. Mine
occupies the top two 5.25" bays...course it don't look 2 pretty with a power
cord plugged into the front...but what the hey.