External HD?

[Shakespeare]

I've got two hard drives that I want to make external. I know you can hook two or more hard drives up internally, but what about when making a USB HD? Can you only use one hard drive per port or could I have them both hooked up to the same device? If I can't make them both external, I'll just toss them in my old computer and use it for storage.

I appreciate your time. ;D

[bicostp]

IDE drives: You have 2 IDE channels, each can have 2 devices on them, for a total of 4 devices. (Unless you add a PCI IDE controller card that has additional IDE channels.) The drives have to be set to 'Master' and 'Slave'; the one on the end of the cable is 'master', the one in the middle is 'slave'. You set this with jumpers. Or you can set both to Cable Select and let them figure it out. Just don't put 2 'masters' or 2 'slaves' on the same channel or the computer won't POST. I generally like to put the boot drive as master on the primary channel, and the secondary storage drive and optical drive on the secondary channel, to maximize throughput. You can get a little bit of a performance boost by

SATA drives: One drive, one port. Simple as that.

You'll need to buy a USB enclosure (or some sort of IDE/SATA to USB adapter) to use one as an external drive. They cost less than 50 bucks. SATA drives plug right in, IDE drives need to be set to their 'single drive' setting (usually master, some oddball manufacturers have a separate jumper pair). You'll most likely have to get 2 enclosures, just because enclosures are designed for one solo drive. You may be able to find one with a controller that can handle 2 drives (many are) and replace the ribbon cable with a regular desktop cable. The only problem will be supplying enough power to run both, since the typical external drive has a 12v 1 amp AC adapter, which is barely enough for 1 drive.

Another thing to consider is that USB is slower than SATA and eSATA, so if you have an eSATA port on your PC, and you have a SATA drive you want to make external, get an eSATA/USB enclosure. If it's an IDE drive, or you don't have an eSATA port, get an enclosure that only handles USB.

If you don't really need portability, and you have extra ports on your motherboard, you're better off hooking it up internally because it will be faster.

[Shakespeare]

Thanks. I suppose I'll just toss them in my old computer and use it as a server, rather than using two HDDs for something I really don't need.

[Shakespeare]

Woo, got it to work. Of course, the thing runs so slowly (being an old computer) and the only spare RAM I have at hand doesn't fit. Oh well.