Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. How do I Add a Hard Drive when I Have no More Connectors?
Whilst most PCs have enough connectors for two or three hard drives plus a DVD drive, what do you do if you need more?
The usual pair of IDE connectors or more recently SATA ports on a motherboard offer all the connections most people need with up to four devices typically being supported. However, if you need extra drives, what are the options?
Hard Drive Controllers
There are a huge range of add on controller cards available on the market. These typically plug in to a PCI or PCI-E socket and allow you to easily add new connections for your drives. At the budget end you might just get one or two more IDE or SATA connectors allowing you to attach some more hard drives or perhaps an extra DVD drive or two. This can also be an economical and pain free way of adding SATA to an older motherboard as well as adding extra ports. Furthermore, a card that supports SATA may also add an external SATA or eSATA connection, more of which later. If you want flexibility, some controller cards offer both SATA and IDE sockets.
As prices increase, extra features start to get added such as support for one or more RAID standards. The lower cost units offer RAID 0, 1 and their variations. RAID 5 is somewhat more involved and cards with RAID 5 support are usually rather more costly. At the top end you can spend a thousand pounds or more on a high spec RAID card.
Raid types
As a quick refresher, RAID 0 allows you to create a striped pair from two drives. Here, data is read and written across two drives at once. The result is faster read/write performance but slightly worse security as having either drive fail pretty much guarantees you'll lose all your data (although you will of course have suitable backup, won't you?).
RAID 1 is mirroring. Here data is written in an identical way to two drives. If one fails, the other will have a copy of the data. Speed is no better though.
Finally RAID 5 uses 3 or more drives. Here one drive acts as a parity drive with the data being written across all three in such a way that if one fails, it can be replaced without any loss of data (it rebuilds itself automatically when replaced) but with the speed bonus of reading/writing across multiple hard drives. This is often used in servers or other commercial type environments and is rare in the home.
There are other RAID variations but these are the most common ones.
Installing internal hard drives
Whatever sort of card/hard drives you go for, installation is broadly similar. Find a free space in the case for the hard drive - most cases have a 'hard drive cage' for putting them in. If you can, fit the new drive(s) with a bit of space to enable airflow and thus help cooling - modern fast drives can get quite warm. You may even want to consider adding an additional case fan near the hard drives.
If the drive is IDE, you need to set it to master or slave via jumpers. Each IDE connection should have a single master with the second drive on the same cable being set to slave. SATA drives don't have to worry about this. The drive then need to be connected to a spare power and data connector. IDE drives all use the standard power connectors found inside PCs but SATA ones can have either that or a 'proper' SATA power connector. PSU's don't always have these so you may need to use an adaptor but these are usually supplied or easily bought.
Once the drive is installed, boot up and use either Windows' own tools for formatting and partitioning the drive or perhaps you may have a third party tool you prefer. Under Windows XP, this is done via Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Note that unless the drive is preformatted, it won't have a drive letter until you have formatted it so don't panic if you can't see your new drive until that has been done. If on the other hand either the BIOS or Disk Management can't see it then check the cables.
External options
Whilst adding a new controller is fine for adding internal drives, another way to quickly and easily add more storage is an external hard drive. These tend to use USB/USB2 connections and when attached, appear as normal hard drives in Windows Explorer.You can read what we thought of the 400Gb Freecom external USB drive model here. The main downside is that the speed isn't as good as an internal one. It is however usually adequate for backup or dumping off old data.
Some external hard drives can also be connected using Firewire although this tends to be rather less common outside those designed specifically for Apple Macs. A more recent option is eSATA or external SATA. We haven't seen too many external drive cases that use this yet but the speeds should be considerably faster than USB/Firewire and in theory ought to approach that of an internal hard drive - after all, it's just an externalised SATA port.
Just because a drive is external, it doesn't rule RAID out the question and there are a number of devices that offer basic RAID facilities via a pair of drives. Increasingly common though is the use in this situation of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. These can hold several hard drives and connect to a network rather than directly to a PC. Because of their roots in the business world, they often add all sorts of power user features, remote management, advanced RAID features and so on. They do add a premium price wise though although this is rapidly changing with this year's NAS's costing what last years external USB hard drives cost.
Summary
Whether you just want an extra hard drive in your PC, something you can back up to and carry away or a reliable, network attached chunk of storage space, it's now easier and cheaper than ever to add this to your PC. Whether you want internal or external storage, you can be installed and up and running in minutes. It can also a great way to breath extra life in to an ageing but otherwise good motherboard by adding SATA and/or RAID facilities.
