New Hard Drive Installation Snafu
 

(Hi everyone.)

So I just bought a new Seagate 400 GB Ultra ATA/100 hard drive and upon beginning to install it I realize my stupid ass 2 year old Dell Desktop only has 1 IDE port on the motherboard (it should have 2), which is running to my DVD and CD-RW drives. My old hard drive is a Seagate 140 GB with a single Serial ATA connection to the motherboard. What can I do to be able to connect both of my hard drives to my computer?

you could get a pci card with ultra ata 100 ports on it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&ATTR6=&ATTR7=

i would actually recommend hooking your cd roms up to that, since its performance is probably lower than the onboard one, and your hard disk is much faster than cd transfer rates.

Ahh, thanks. Those definitely look like about what I need. Shame I have to pay extra to install a hard drive whose sole reason for being bought was that it was 50 bucks off. God I hate Dell computers and their annoyingness to upgrade.

Well, (sorry for the belated response), you could also turn your internal HDD to an external HDD.

You could also return your ATA harddisk and get a Serial ATA instead.

Might even cost you less than the drive you already got plus the required IDE controller.

Well, the Serial 400 GB was like 250 and I got the Ultra 400 GB for like 180 and then 50 bucks for an IDE controller card. I didn't have an extra Serial slot anyway, nor a cable with multiple serial jacks.