The subject says it all. I have a friend with an old Dell 3000. It has a CD Rom and a Floppy Drive, and two hard drives. Both IDE cables are USED, and there are no more IDE connections on the motherboard. It appears to me that my only salvation is to add a USB2/Firewire PCI board (there is an open slot), and use a USB2 to IDE adapter to run to an externally mounted internal drive - or just use a USB2 or Firewire External HD. The friend wants to avoid using external drives due to space considerations. I've never heard of such a thing as an IDE cable splitter, and I don't believe there is such a thing. Any one have any suggestions?If you have a spare PCI slot you can add a PCI IDE controller to the computer.
They're relatively inexpensive and easy to install.
Hope this helps.Calum:

Thanks so much for pointing out the most obvious (to everyone except me) solution to this problem. Apparently, when I see a problem with one approach (no more IDE connections on the motherboard), I have a mental block against considering a related approach.Quote from: veritasffg

It has a CD Rom and a Floppy Drive, and two hard drives. Both IDE cables are used, and there are no more IDE connections on the motherboard.

Well you wouldn't really want to put a HDD on the same cable as an optical drive anyways...

Calum:

Thanks so much for pointing out the most obvious (to everyone except me) solution to this problem. Apparently, when I see a problem with one approach (no more IDE connections on the motherboard), I have a mental block against considering a related approach.

Quote from: patio on July 16, 2008, 08:17:11 PM

Well you wouldn't really want to put a HDD on the same cable as an optical drive anyways...

Care to give some reason(s) for this statement Patio

In some cases depending on the equipment it may slow down the transfer speeds on the HDD to the highest optical drive speed.

A CD rom and a hard drive can co-exist on one ide although there may be some degradation of the hdd data transfer speed, hardly noticable.

Two devices on one cable - speed impact
There are many debates about how much a slow device can impact the performance of a faster device on the same cable. There is an effect, but the debate is confused by the blurring of two quite different causes, called here "Slowest Speed" and "One Operation at a Time".

"Slowest speed"
It is a common misconception that, if two devices of different speed capabilities are on the same cable, both devices' data transfers will be constrained to the speed of the slower device.

For all modern ATA host adapters this is not true, as modern ATA host adapters support independent device timing. This allows each device on the cable to transfer data at its own best speed. Even with older adapters without independent timing, this effect only impacts the data transfer phase of a read or write operation. This is usually the shortest part of a complete read or write operation.

"One operation at a time"
This is caused by the omission of both overlapped and queued feature sets from most parallel ATA products. Only one device on a cable can perform a read or write operation at one time, therefore a fast device on the same cable as a slow device under heavy use will find it has to wait for the slow device to complete its task first.

However, most modern devices will report write operations as complete once the data is stored in its onboard cache memory, before the data is written to the (slow) magnetic storage. This allows commands to be sent to the other device on the cable, reducing the impact of the "one operation at a time" limit.

The impact of this on a system's performance depends on the application. For example, when copying data from an optical drive to a hard drive (such as during software installation), this effect probably doesn't matter: Such jobs are necessarily limited by the speed of the optical drive no matter where it is. But if the hard drive in question is also expected to provide good throughput for other tasks at the same time, it probably should not be on the same cable as the optical drive.