Hello, My motherboard is a 'Microstar 6191 Motherboard'. I was wondering if I could add another hard drive to it. Unfortunatley there are only three pci slots. One for the floppy disk drive, one for the DVD-Drive (master) and CD ROM drive (slave, combined). The final one is for my current hard drive. Is it possible to buy a ribbon cable with two plug-in connectors so I can have one drive master and the other drive slave. Please advise

Yes. By the way, PCI slots aren't used for IDE cables, the IDE ports are and I'm personaly surprised to hear that you dont have two connectors on these already. Your hard drive is primary master presently and your cdrom /dvd roms drives are secondary master and slave.

The short answer , Yes! Set the 2 drives up as IDE 1 master and slave. One will be drive C:\ and the other will be drive D:\. Some might say to make them IDE1 master and IDE2 master and couple them with the other IDE devices as slaves. The slowest ones slow down the fastest ones so keep the 2 fastest together and the 2 slowest together.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. By the way, I have 3 IDE slots: - Floppy Disk Drive - CDROM / DVD ROM - Current Hard Disk Drive The Floppy Disk Drive has its own IDE cable (with its own IDE slot). The CDROM/DVDROM has one IDE Ribbon with primary/secondary connectors and is connected to the secondary IDE slot. My current hard drive has one IDE ribbon with only one connector which is connected to the primary slot. In other words, I do not have another connector for my new hard drive.

Actually what you really have is two IDE slots, each capable of running two IDE disks as described by Colin Duggan. The floppy connector is not an IDE slot. It is just a floppy interface and it to is capable of running two floppy drives. As you yourself suggested, all you need is anithe cable with two three connectors on it. One in the IDE slot and one each for each disk, master and slave. Put the CDROM and DVD on one cable and your current hard disk and new hard disk on the other cable. PCI slots have nothing to do with disk drives. The PCI slots are where the expansion cards are plugged into with connections to the outside word. Stuart

Thanks Stuart for taking the time to reply. It is much appreciated. Previously I have phoned for advice and ended up with a very large phone bill and the wrong solution! Its nice to have experts like yourself helping us.

I have to disagree with the suggested drive setup...we've had this discussion on here many times before. If you have a newer motherboard, ATA HDD & ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drives, you can mix & match on IDE cables & one will NOT slow down the other down. This was true years ago in the days of PIO, but it is NOT true of moderm systems. If you want links, I'll be glad to post them (again). Here's the best setup that provides optimal data transfer across channels: Pri master = HDD # 1 Pri slave = CD or DVD-ROM Secondary master = CD burner Secondary slave = HDD # 2