I am thinking of installing a second hard drive on my pc. I only have a single scsi hard drive in right now but am thinking of adding an ide hard drive as my slave. Can this be done or do I have to get another scsi hard drive and make that my slave? Do any of you know any good websites or message boards I could go to to get this type of information?

thanks

Im pretty sure it needs to be both SCSI or both IDE. The reasoning behind my answer is the actual wire size differences. The SCSI wire is bigger than ide so i can't see how you would hook the ide up as slave. ::

By default your motherboard should have at least two EIDE bus sockets built in on it. If you want an IDE drive, make sure it is master and then plug it into on of the EIDE sockets using an EIDE cable. If you have a CD-ROM, Zip Drive, DVD-ROM, etc plugged into one EIDE socket then use a spare socket if you have one, otherwise the performance will be alot slower. You may need a new EIDE cable if you dont have one spare.

Out of interest is your SCSI bus socket on a card (eg PCI) or is it built into your motherboard?

Uh if you have a SCSI drive now then there is no slave to add, a new ide device will be the master on the *different* IDE bus.

ide <> scsi.

ide = onboard with any motherboard newer than pentium 1. 2 channels, each channel takes one master and one slave. aka ATA, DMA, UDMA, DMA33, DMA66, DMA100, DMA133, DMA166, IDE, EIDE.

scsi = onboard with a few motherboards, add in PCI for almost everyone else. Single ended SCSI can add 7 devices, double ended can add 15 devices. There is no slave/master but rather a SCSI ID, usually 0-7 or 0-15 with the controller itself being ID 7. SCSI is usually measured in a mix of speed and cable type such as 50pin SCSI-2 or 68pin UW-SCSI, etc.

If you have SCSI already, go with it. A little faster, and easier to deal with over IDE. It is a little pricier over IDE though. Darin did pretty well explaining it already, but I will add that if you want to add an IDE drive, there is no problem mixing the types. I do that already in my system.

This is an ongoing debate among several circles on which is best. There is no answer unless you state the use for it. Let's see :

IDE - omnipresent, very supported, cheap, unsuited for stressful ends, CPU-hog

SCSI - independent system (your CPU load is always low during access), expensive, slightly less supported, expensive, robust

Don't run medium or large scale email or web or news servers based on an IDE-raid. You're asking for trouble. They are not designed for it and they are not adequate. IBM tried to make it more adequate for heavy use with command queueing, but it never took off.

If all you want is home use, go for IDE.

how do I add a new eide hard drive to a scsi system? keeping my current scsi hard-drive as the the boot drive? can any body help?

Depends on your BIOS. Most newer BIOS have the option to select SCSI/other as the boot drive. Some older ones can be fooled by telling them that no IDE drives are installed (let the OS find it)...