wrote:
Hi there, I just bought a Seagate IDE 400G hard drive and wanted to use

it as my second hard drive. My Dell desktop already has a SATA hard
drive. Unfortunately after I bought this hard drive, I found out that
my system board only has 1 IDE port which has already been used up for
2 device: a DVD ROM and a DVD burner. So now my question is:

1. can I use an IDE hard drive together with a SATA hard drive all
togther?

Yes

2. Can I try to get a IDE interface cable that has 3 connectors (1
master, 2 slaves) for connecting my IDE hard drive, in addition to the
2 DVD drives? I searched google, in one occasion (Years 1999 post) that

1 IDE port can only connect up to 2 devices, is that still true now? I
called DELL support, the guy said I can use this configuration, but I
am not sure if he really knows this.

You get 1 master, and 1 slave on IDE. Thats ALL. SCSI is a different
story.

3. If I can use such a cable, where can I buy it? My 2 DVD drive is on
the top on the computer, and the hard drive is at the bottom of the
computer, so I need a cable that is extened quite a bit on the 3rd
connector.

You can make one, but it won't work. If you need more IDE devices, get
a hard drive controller that plugs into a free PCI slot. Promise makes
them.


4. My system board does has a floppy drive port which looks like an IDE

port, can someone know for sure a floppy drive is an IDE port which I
can use to hook up my hard drive?


No. It's NOT an IDE port.


If I know this cause so many problem, I would have bought a SATA drive
instead. really ****ed off