I was in my local Frys store, and asked if they carry any ATA cards so that I could add 2 more hard disks to my system under Linux, they told me no they dont carry anything like that, so.....

How does one add more hard drives when all the cable slots are taken up, I could remove one dvd writter (I have two),and use one of those cable slots, but I'd rather not.

I have 2 free PCI slots on my MB.

Thanks

Some Promise ATA controller cards are supported by Linux (and the kernel without additional drivers).

Don't suppose you have SATA connectors on your system board do you - easy way to upgrade with new drives if you do. Otherwise you'd need look at a PCI card supported under Linux as you've been looking at, but will probably need a more specialist IT store or order online. There's bound to be some listed under the HCL on here that have been tried + tested.

As a followup to Keruskerfürst’s comment, look at the Promise Ultra100TX2 (0r Ultra133TX2) PCI IDE controller card.

I’ve installed a bunch of these in linux systems without any support problems. The 2.6 kernel and at least the later 2.4 kernels usually have built-in support. Just install the card and make any changes to grub.conf/menu.lst and fstab that are needed.

You can also install two or more identical cards in a system if you want set up a multidrive linux software raid, as long as you have enough PCI slots. Your main throughput limitation will be your PCI bus speed, which caps out at about 133MB/s on a 33MHz bus and 266MB/s on a 66MHz bus.


And as a followup to fouldsy’s comment, don’t put a lot of faith in advice you get in big-box stores about linux-compatible hardware.