I have a system with 2 HDs (Master and one Slave for Backups),is it possible to add a third one, if so how to set (jumper for a third slave,etc.)Thanx Hamilton

Hi Hamilton,Most motherboards have 2 IDE connectors. You computer's other IDE may have CD and/or DVD drive(s). If you only have one CD-DVD, you can make that a slave to a HD master. You'll have to run a setup in BIOS upon reboot to detect the new configuration though.SCSI drives can be daisy chained right through Z:, as I understand it. However, I assume you don't have SCSI. Others may know more. With the size of today's HD's, is replacing a smaller one with one of more capacity a solution?Bruce.

Pretty close, Bruce - not bad for a ol' country boy frm JeffcoCO:-lol.Actually, now that I reread it, you are right on the money. My response is mostly parroting what you have to say. Good work!!Most of the time the bios is set to autodetect the drives on the controller cables. Just have to jumper the drives and normally that is diagrammed well on the HDD and CD-ROM.The following might be an example of what he needs to do: 3 HDD with 40GB each. 1 CD-ROM/DVD Combo drive.HDD 0 and 1 on controller 0 with HDD 0 set as master and HDD 1 set as slave. HDD 2 and the CD-ROM on controller 1 with HDD 2 set as master and CD set as a slave. These can be swapped around if you will be accessing the CD more than the HDD on this controller. Whichever is master on either controller will get priority. Go into the bios setup and make sure all drives are set to auto detect.With SCSI, you can have devices 0-15 making 16 connections. You can daisy chain these to add more capacity. You can also add SCSI cards to PCs and go outside the box to a rack device with all kinds of drives in it.

Thank you guys,Yes I have only one CD-DVD and no SCSI, I

You don't mention the sizes or rotational speeds of your drives, and there are some efficiency issues that you should consider in adding another drive to your system. For instance, if the new drive rotates significantly faster (7200 vs 5400, the typical "system" speed) you might want to consider making it your primary and using the slower drives to "store" stuff.Lets say you have this scenario:New drive: 80GB, 7200 rpm, 8 mb cache.Old drive 0: 20GB, 5400 rpm, no cache (typical)Old drive 1: same as 0.A possible scenario might be: Set this big drive up on Controller 0 as the master - this places the newest, largest, fastest, and most efficient drive in the "top dog" position. Partition the new drive to be 2 - 40GB partitions, with drive assignments C: and D: or 3 - 20GB partitions C:, D:, and E: - whatever winds your clock. Put the O/S and all of its related software on C:, put your flight sim software on drive D:, and in the second scenario, put related or other program files on the E: drive if they will run from other than the C: drive. (some programs want to be close to the O/S and do not run very well in other partitions).Old drive 0 partitioned to 2 - 10GB partitions, E: and F: and set up on Controller 1 as the master with the CD-ROM drive set up as the slave on this controller. Since E: would be the first partition of the second physical drive move your pagefile to this drive and partition. The default location for the page file is on the C: drive with the O/S and this (as Microsoft will tell you) is an inefficient use of resources because operations to the page file get in the way of O/S operations. Putting the paging file on a separate physical disk will dramatically increase the access speed your system would have to the page file, making the system run faster. Also, M$ recommends 1.5 times the RAM size for the page file and that is what I use but for the upper limit of the page file, I triple the RAM size. This "sets aside" in a way, a large chunk more than the default that the O/S "can" use if it really needs it. It should never need it, but in heavy memory intensive operations, it cannot hurt and gives your system a gracious plenty breathing room.On the second partition of Old drive 0, you could place your C: drive and system state backups. Again, 10Gb here should be way more than enough space for backup of critical (O/S) data.Then, on the Old drive 1 physically place it as the slave on Controller 0 (yes, behind the new, big drive), and use it for storage of the multitudes of FS related files like zips of aircraft and scenery that you don't want to put in the actual flight sim program but want to have at the ready. Since you have a lot of on-line (not Internet on-line, but system internal on-line) storage there is no need to archive much on cds unless you really want to. You could also store mp3s and mpegs on that drive and they would be readily accessable but out of the way for the really important stuff like your favorite 777 and the FS to fly it with.The most important thing to keep in mind about any of these ideas is to keep track of which drive has which partitions and which partitions have which drive letters. I know it can be confusing but if you logically think through what you want to do and then diagram what you have done, it is very workable.You might also want to make it so that you can physically swap out your main drive (the new, big one) with one of your older drives and put Linux on the older one so that you can boot to Linux once in a while and teach yourself a really good operating system. :-lol