How many IDE drives can I connect?

How many IDE drives can I connect?

Most motherboards that support IDE (EIDE/ATA) have two IDE interfaces, each interface supports the maximum of two devices. Therefore, you can only have a maximum of four IDE (EIDE/ATA) devices connected to your motherboard.

How many drives can be connected to a single IDE connector?

Each IDE channel can support two drives. A single IDE ribbon cable has three connection. One connection connects to the motherboard and the other two connections are available for the two drives.

How many hard disks can be connected to a system?

From operating system perspective there are no limitation on how many drives you can attach. In Windows you can have up to 26 drives mapped to a drive letter and some users are very close to this limit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4652545/windows-what-happens-if-i-finish-drive-letters-they-are-26.

Is SATA faster than IDE?

In IDE data transfer speed ranges from 100 MB/s to 133 MB/s. In SATA data transfer speed ranges from 150 MB/s for SATA I and 300 MB/s for SATA II. IDE drives are slower than SATA drives. SATA drives are faster than IDE drives.

How many wires can be found in an IDE ribbon cable for a hard disk?

IDE ribbon cables have either 40 or 80 wires. There is a connector at each end of the cable and another one about two-thirds of the distance from the motherboard connector.

How many IDE device can connect on a single IDE channel?

two devices
A single IDE interface can support two devices. Most motherboards come with dual IDE interfaces (primary and secondary) for up to four IDE devices.

Do they still make IDE drives?

Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products.

Can you have 2 hard drives?

There are two main ways to use multiple hard drives on a single computer: You can connect multiple external hard drives to a laptop or desktop computer using a USB or Firewire connection. External hard drives are easy to install and are usually portable. You can install additional hard disks on a desktop computer.

Can you have 3 hard drives one computer?

No more than 2 drives can use an IDE channel. If your motherboard supports it, use the faster Serial ATA (SATA) drives instead. Many motherboards support up to four SATA hard drives (rather than the usual 2 IDE) so you can create a RAID array.

How can you differentiate two IDE drives on the same cable?

To allow for two drives on the same cable, IDE uses a special configuration called master and slave. This configuration allows one drive’s controller to tell the other drive when it can transfer data to or from the computer.

Can a computer have more than one IDE device?

If you need to connect an additional IDE device to the computer, you can try one of the below solutions. If you have multiple CD or DVD drives, you may want to consolidate into one drive. For example, DVD drives can read CDs and DVDs. Therefore, unless a fast CD-ROM is needed, you can consider removing the extra CD-ROM.

How many disks can you have on an IDE controller?

You can have up to two IDE controllers with two disks on each controller. The startup disk (sometimes referred to as the boot disk) must be attached to one of the IDE devices. The startup disk can be either a virtual hard disk or a physical disk.

How many IDE controllers do I need for Hyper V?

Ben, You can have up to two IDE controllers with two disks on each controller. Normally, you`ll have VMs system partition on IDE Controller 0, and optional DVD drive on IDE controller 1. Check the settings on the VM you work with. If you intend to modify/add vhds to these controllers, you`ll need to power off your VM.

How does an IDE controller work with a hard drive?

The birth of the IDE interface led to combining a controller like this one with a hard drive. IDE was created as a way to standardize the use of hard drives in computers. The basic concept behind IDE is that the hard drive and the controller should be combined.