Not sure if this is the right place to ask this so he goes anything.

Can anyone tell me is it possible to connect 3 or 4 hard drives to a signal IDE MOBO port, i have 4 IDE 250gb Maxtor hard drives i would like to hook them all up to my pc i use for downloads, but i am not sure if i can do it with out a special cable that will hook them up.

now i do know i can hook 2 of the hard drives using a dual IDE cable but is there such a thing as a quad cable and if there is will there be any issues i should be aware of running 4 hard drives of a signal cable of the motherboard signal IDE port connector. i also know i could run them as a external drives but would prefer to have them installed in the hard drive cage in my pc where they would stay alot cooler vs the external drive when i am running my pc 24/7.

If this can be down can some one post some links to the IDE cables,i have looked and i can not seem to find the ones i am looking for, again there would have to be one end of the cable that connects to the IDE port on the mobo and the other end should have 4 IDE connector that would connect to each hard drive separate.

Can some one please help me with this and let me know if it can be done.

Any help would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks ranger1033

master/slave....only two positions, so it stands to reason it won't work.
ide controller card would let you run (normally) 4 off 2 connectors.

You need a ATA controller card or you could sell all the drives and get 2 sata 500GB hdd's or a 1 sata 1TB hdd.

any sata ports?

Quote: Originally Posted by BeetleMan any sata ports?

Yes i have about 6 sata ports on my mobo it is a DFI Lanpart UT..

ide controllers:

Newegg.com - ide controller, 2 x ATA 133, ATA, Controllers / RAID Cards

chipset of my choice: Silicon Image SIL0680


another option:

Newegg.com - ide controller, Adapters & Gender Changers

Yeah, a hardware IDE controller solution would be your only fix. I would get SATA drives and image my old data to the new drives, but that's just me. IDE drives are yesterday's technology, kind of like read only CD drives.

Quote: Originally Posted by ranger1033 Yes i have about 6 sata ports on my mobo it is a DFI Lanpart UT..

You could get sata to ide adapters then.....
Newegg.com - SYBA SD-SATA-IDE SATA/IDE Adapter, Connect IDE Devices to SATA Port on Motherboard - Adapters & Gender Changers

Thanks guys for your reply i will look into getting IDE controller card.

Thanks

I just rebuilt my file server with a new mobo. I have 4 IDE HDD, 1 IDE DVD, and 6 SATA drives.

The modo has 1 IDE port and 4 SATA ports.
I used a Promise Ultra100 TX2 (2 IDE Ports for 4 more devices) for the additional IDE devices and a Promise Fasttrack SATA 300 TX4 (4 sata ports)

So I have room for 2 more SATA and 1 more IDE device. Too bad there is only room for 2 more drives in the case.

Oh, and if you are curious there are the following drives:

IDE:
1 40gb
2 100gb
1 500gb

SATA:
2 250gb
2 320gb
2 500gb (well, 1 is being RMAd at the moment)