Replying to Connecting Multiple Hard Drive - Best Transfer Speeds?

If your PC is still running on IDE you can populated 2 drives per an interface.
IDE0, IDE1 as master/slave or cable select. Now days the preferred option is cable select. Limit of 4 drives
with no optical drive.

You can add on ATA/SATA card to your PCI, PCIe bus. Which you give you another set of 4 drives.

With SATA it depends on the number of SATA ports on you motherboard or addin card. Early motherboards had no support for SATA or just a couple ports. New boards typically have 4 or more.

Within each of these drives you can have 4 primary partitions or up to 3 primary partions and one secondary partition with logical drives - each their own partitions.

Windows 2000/XP/Vista/etc. have support for Dynamic Disks. This gives the ability to resize partitions, or strip partitions across other Dynamic Disks. So if you you have a bunch of mixed match 20GB, 30GB, 40GB drives. You set them up as one big drive.

When transfering data speed is dependent upon what type of BUS(es) your transferring on. Reading from a 100GB ATA-6 on an IDE bus, writing to a 500GB ATA-6 over a USB1.0 bus (usb enclosure with IDE inside). The bottleneck here is a dated motherboard that does not have support for USB2.0 bus.

Here are some of the buses listed, even though there are scsi buses, and raid over scsi they usually don't really apply to to consumer users.

SATA II, SATA 1, External SATA ATA6, ATA5, ATA..2, USB2.0, USB, Firewire.

Nowdays external enclosures are geared towards USB 2.0 with an internal SATA connection to the enclosed hard drive. Some options also have and an external SATA or eSATA port which can connect to a pc with a dongle that connects to an internal SATA port, and is usually mounted in the back panel of the PC.

Some of the more higher end external enclosures have support for firewire, network, or can house multiple drives, and even offer various hardware/software backup options.

The best practice now is to invest in a pc or motherboard with as many SATA ports with SATAII or upcoming standard, have external SATA ports on you pc/laptop case, and make sure the external drive you have has support for USB2.0 (USB 3.0 if your purchasing later in 2010), eSATA port, and if possible a Gigabit network port. These will eventually be mainstream in consumer pc/laptops as the price of technology lowers and as the demand for speeds increase. These solutions should get you by for next 5 years.

What normally takes hours or a couple of days to transfer/backup data will take mere minutes or at most couple of hours.

Levimage

Here is the thing. The more drives you connect the slower, you want big drives.

Actually, that really depends. First of all, it is often the case that the biggest drives on the market have slower rotational speeds (RPM) and longer seek times than the next tier down. The drives are optimized for different tasks, the largest drives often for streaming and high throughput, the smaller often for fast access times.

Additionally, you can get amazing performance out of am array of disks if they do not have to share channels often. This means either having a specialized RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) controller, which are awfully cheap these days, or having enough memory that the things you need from your secondary drive are usually in memory already and your hard drive controller has more options for rearranging the I/O to happen in the most efficient way. But, since IDE RAID controllers with 8 or more channels are now fairly common, that is a good way to go. You can stripe (combine more than one disk into what looks like one big disk for your software), or mirror (have one drive be a real-time backup for the other) or various combinations of the two. In both cases, read operations can be split across multiple drives / I/O channels and in striping, the writes can be spread across multiple drives. Most controllers support configurations where you do striping with some redundancy such that losing one hard drive or possibly even more than one will allow you to recover all of the data.

It has been a few years since I have used this kind of technology and their are brands now I don't even recognize, But Promise is still there and is one of the brands I used on a regular basis. They seem to range from $60-$260 (e.g. http://www.superware...X4000/p/1519558 ). We used to have driver problems with Promise controllers running under UNIX (Linux, BSD, Solaris) but never real problems under Windows and they claim to support Linux properly now. I first started playing with these devices in 1994-5. I forget the brand, but it was a 4-channel RAID controller with a 286 processor and upgradable RAM. I had a 486 DX2 at the time and I joked that the hard drive controller was faster and had more RAM than a friend of mine's 286 computer. I used it for my thesis work (computer simulation) to squeeze as much performance out of that system as I could and have a bit of insurance if a drive failed. Because of the mirroring, I got lazy with backups (I had an old QIC tape backup system) and got bit badly when a power surge took out the hard drive controller AND the hard drives in one go. Don't think that mirroring does not mean you need to do backups!

You can also do "software RAID" with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh now. This allows you to do striping and mirroring across multiple drives and even between, say, and IDE and a USB drive, but using software RAID when the performance of the drives and buses are not very close (like say RAID over four internal IDE drives or over four Firewire-connected drives) you will get very strange performance. Usually what I see people do is mirror between master and slave drives on one IDE chain and stripe across two IDE chains. The Promise controller I link to has four independent channels for four drives. You used to see (1997-2002 or so) Promise RAID controllers built-in to quite a few commodity PC motherboards. Asus did that for a while too, and I almost always preferred the Asus controllers.

Server systems often use RAID to increase performance. I have worked with professional RAID setups with as many as 16-32 drives in a single array and multiple arrays. When you have, for instance, 32 fast 20 GB drives, the server can handle a lot of requests simultaneously. Hard drive failures were easy to handle with some of these systems: the front of the bad drive lights up; you unlock the case, pull the handle on the affected drive; slide it out and slide a new one in; you can then take the old one back to the lab to see if it can be fixed or needs to go back to the manufacturer; the server automatically starts rebuilding the blank drive from the mirror.

Anyway, you can make use of your extra hard drives if you want to and you may get surprisingly good performance.

Any Issues with Multiple drivesConnecting Multiple Hard Drive - Best Transfer Speeds?

I have one IDE and two SATA drives and several USB drives, I want to connect all of them via USB.

No problem so far, but will there be issues on boot up?

Are there any BIOS considerations?

One TB, One 300 GB, One 40GB The TB drive is the only true external, the others come from defunct computers.

-reply by Gerald R Zollar

Here is the thing. The more drives you connect the slower, you want big drives.

This is a prime example of technology being so much behind our usage requirements. I have about 5 hard drives from old laptops which are all in perfect working order.It was bout 3 years ago I had also thought there should be a way to bank them all together as one. Here we are 3 years down the track and still no such device other than putting them individually in an external HD case and connect them to a usb hub. But mg that will be so slow.
Now we see meg external TB HD's coming out onto the market, but soon as we buy one , we will then have sold storage devises the same as storage cards are made in mega sizes making the HD obsolete. You will know when this is going to happen when the HD prices plunge. which this seams to be happening now.

-jcampen

Yeah, just waiting for the prices to drop. I always use the internal drives as externals by hooking them up to my USB enclosure drive since I'm working mainly on my laptop. Just got a 400GB Seagate hard drive for a good deal this week. That will be my starting point for transferring my files back and forth since it has the most space

Need a 1 terabyte hard driv

or two 500 gig drives ? One internal and one in the USB box ?

Thanks for the replies guys

Yeah, my idea was to go full on IDE but with 5 or 6 total hard drives, that would mean I have to swap it in and out.

I'll hook up three hard drives at a time. If I need to transfer data from the two hard drives on the secondary channel, I'll deal with the slow speed. It's time to keep my files more organized. Need a 1 terabyte hard drive