DS3 only has one IDE port

yes you can have two cd drives or two hard drives or one cd drive one hard drive well you get the picture but one drive needs to be set to master and one to slave
or if you need more than two devices you can get a ide card
 
I would invest in a couple SATA hard drives and run raid 1 and save the IDE port for 2 optical drives, such as DVD drive and DVD burner. Raid 1 means mirroring, in other words, if one drive fails, you still have a good drive to boot to. Then all you do is either fix the broken drive or get a replacement and attach it back to the system and the raid will rebuild itself.
 
Really? I thought that if one of the drives failed, the whoel RAID system fails. Or is that raid 0?

Either way, what are the benefits of using raid as opposed to simply having more than one drive under My Computer?
 
That would be raid 0. The benefit of running RAID 1 instead of just having more than one drive with windows and all programs installed is that with raid there is no downtime in booting to the other drive. In Raid 1 both drives have the same data. If one drive fails, it automatically boots to the other drive acting like nothing happened. Then you just have to replace the bad drive with a good one back into the system. Raid software detects it and rebuilds the array so that both drives contain the same data again. I've had too many hard drives go out on me and too many reinstalls of windows to not run raid 1. It helped me quite a few times already.
 
yes. if you have 2-500 gb drives. then you will have one drive at 500 gb when using raid 1. Thats the whole idea of Mirroring (raid 1) I have 2-250 gb drives in raid 1 and then 2-120 gb drives in raid 1.
 
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