How can I build a 3 1/2 & 5 1/4 bay?

[abularkin]

I only have 4 IDE ports, but I have 3 HDDs, a CD-RW, and a DVD-ROM. Does anyone have any cost-effective suggestions (labor okay) to switching out one of the HDDs with the DVD-ROM? Perhaps with some sort of fabricated sleeve/wiring mechanism?

[fmctm1sw]

What kind of hard drives are you running? They very resonable these days. Maybe you could ditch one (or two) and size up a bit...??

[gll99]

You can buy an IDE ata100 or ata133 IO board. It fits in a pci slot and will allow you to add up to 4 more ide devices. A new ata100 card is about $50 in Canada. Make sure your power supply can support the extra load.

This portion was edited in

Make sure you have good ventilation with these extra devices too or system could overheat and cause sporadic lockups and shutdowns.

Otherwise should work fine.

[MOVIEGEEK]

These cases may help
http://www4.justnet.ne.jp/~kat/pc/ern/ern001.htm
http://www.lupo.co.jp/develop/ccpc/ccpcbox_index.html

[EddyH]

make sure you have enough power plugs too, maybe get a splitter at the same time as the ata133 board "just in case" - and make sure you have enough IDE cables!

Other things to watch out for - running out of IRQs/DMAs, other board incompatibilities (either with the drives or the mo'bo). Had all three with my super-budget ATA board, but it works well enough, ie I can use all the space of my 180gb disc, and have 5 IDE devices at once.

If you have a lot of stuff in your PC - eg Network, USB, PCI video (or maybe AGP, i dunno if that needs less resources), soundcard, some of the old style ports, then you may be right down to the wire in terms of expandability. Luckily, as far as i can tell, twin-channel boards only use one IRQ/DMA for their entire operation, whereas motherboards use one of each for each IDE channel (each 2-drive cable). So you can disable one "onboard" channel and have the new board take up the position previously occupied by it, giving you six available plugs.

Some older CD drives or even writers may not work with it, possibly not older discs as well. And if you have an old Slot A non-DDR Gigabyte board, 16mb/sec is about all the thing will be able to muster across the now-crowded PCI bus...
(133mb/s total to throw around in each direction, split between network, USB, sound and video = not much... an AGP video card and an ISA sound probably eases the strain somewhat.. still, we need a new expansion standard, to go along with Serial ATA. How in the world do USB2.0 and Firewire achieve their full rates with such a bottleneck?)

Final caveat.. ensure there's enough space to put stuff. At the same time as the board, splitter (and cable if needed), it may be wise to get a 5-inch to 3-inch bay converter, to stick either the floppy disc or one of the HDs into, as the average modern miditower has 3x 5-inch slots - but at the same time only has 3x 3-inch slots, for floppy/ZIP + 2 hard drives. I've got a hard disc precariously screwed in on one side only in a 5-inch bay cuz i'm too lazy to get a converter

[Doggiedaddy]

MOVIEGEEK
What is the dB rating on those egg cartons. The girl case would be out of my range.

HeHe
Dd