Does anyone have experience of IDE or EIDE expansion cards (PCI)? I have used up all 4 motherboard connectors (2 HDDs, 2 CD/DVDs) and I want to add another internal HDD. I know external ones are pretty good but I just don't have room in my work area for yet another external device! One person said these cards are great, and at least as fast as a motherboard connection, but I would like to get further opinion before purchasing. Thanks

The IDE controller cards work fine. Some of them allow you to boot to a drive connected to the card, some don't. I would ask this though, If the existing HDs are full have you archived that data to a more permanent place, like CDR or DVDR? Unless your drives are extremely small, chances are they aren't filled with programs, but rather files. The old addage is this "it isn't a matter of if your HD fails, but when". If the drives are small and you are out of space but want to keep all existing files easily accessable I suggest Backing up to optical, consolidate, remove one drive, install a larger drive, copy backed up files to one of the drives.

Thanks for the comments. I agree absolutely with the inevitability of HDD failure - in fact it happened to me earlier this year, with a virtually brand new disk. It is partly for this reason that I want to spread my files over several medium size disks, rather than putting them all in one large one. Other reason is that I do quite a lot of video, and the project files tend to be approx 10-12 GB each, so even with several 80GB disks I soon fill up! Anyway, I just bought a DVD writer (Plextor 712A) which is doing a great job helping me back everything up...just in case. Great product, installed cleanly first time, tons of detailed documentation, nice and quiet in operation - love it!