Hard drive Question

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o2pb

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hello, I was wondering....

I have 2 HDs right now, and I wanna get a 120GB drive for video capture/storage.
Will I be able to connect 3 HDs to my comp at the same time? I got 2 extra power cables coming out of my power supply (400 watts), but I don't have an extra data cable (thin long cable). Does the new hard drive come with some sort of splitter that will let me connect it?

Also, what the hell is 8mb cache? Is it gonna make any difference?
 
No

I'm assuming with the "thin long cables" you're getting an IDE hard drive in which case you'd need to get an IDE controller which will give you i believe 2 more slots to connect IDE cables. You should have 2 drives running off of each cable straight from your motherboard and you should have 2 slots on the motherboard meaning 4 devices running. if you need more you need the card. Not sure the technical terminology behind it but 8mb cache and a 7200RPM drive are best. The 7200 RPM means it spins faster so it will search the data on it faster. The 8mb cache i'm not sure what it is but i know it's better than having 2mb. Hopefully i didn't confuse ya
 
The RPM speed is more important than 8 MB cashe, but it does help some. You need a PCI controller card that will allow you to connect more hard drives. Put it in an empty PCI slot and then plug in your new hard drive to it. You also might want to look into getting a serial hard drive, rather than a parallel as it gets even better performance ( that will need a serial PCI card and not the normal parallel PCI card). You can also get PCI controller cards with RAID that can give you even better performance, but that requires 2 hard drives and if you don't know anything about it you should stay away from it.
 
Ohh yea. IDE controllers are expansion cards, that go into PCI slots? How much are they?
 
Question?

I was just wondering if you guys could help me out. Me and my friends all want to RAID our drives (he's running 2 80GB's and i'm going to have 2 160's shortly) but neither of us have experience with RAID yet. If someone could give us a little how to or whatever about raiding 'em i'd appreciate it. Also can you RAID 2 drives and have 1 drive that's non-RAID cause i have an extra 60Gig laying around that i would use for backup or running dual OS or something but i don't know anything about RAID so if someone could help me out with that i'd appreciate it.
 
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