How to Connect 3 Hard Drives To Motherboard At The Same Time?

[Yaropolk]

Hi
I have 3 Hard drives 2 attached with my comp. 1st master second slave 3rd not attached but has OS on it I use this 3rd HD to test new software. Now is there a way for me to attach all 3 drives at the same time so I do not have to open my case to disconnect the ribbon wire, and unplug their molex power cables? I want a tool or cable to solv the problem since i can only attach 2 HDDs at a time since my motherboard has 2 ports for HDD. I don't want to lose hard drive speeds by using such a new cable either so please let me know.
& how can I set up my pc to choose which OS or hard drive to boot from?
Thanks,

[Theodot]

Could you buy a external hard drive? attach using USB and your away!!!

[Barclay]

you could also either connect with your optical drive if you only have one... ( ide can have two devices on each cable or controller ) or you could get an ide card to add to your computer and connect that way....

[Allan.d]

Are you sure that your motherboard does not have a second IDE channel? If you have a CDROM/DVD, then that is also an IDE, so you can connect one drive on that channel. If you have only one, then you can only connect two drives that way, but as mentioned you can add a IDE board or connect it with a USB enclosure.

[Yaropolk]

Thanks for the replies. The fact is that I don't just want to use the drive as data storage. I want to have windows on it. I'd like to be able to choose which windows to boot from two separate hard drive sources.

[Bala_bala0]

You can have a computer set up with 3 hard drives and 3 IDE CD/DVD drives.

While SATA is one good way to go, you can also install PCI IDE, SATA or SCSI controller cards to add more drives to any style of system.

Another option for your data drive would be to use an external SATA or USB drive.

As to multi-booting, or booting off of other than the "C:" drive, there are several options.

If you connect the drive you wish to boot off of to an alternate controller or card, you can set that as the first boot device.

Or, when you install Windows, you can set the installation path to the drive you desire. The boot files will still be on the C: drive. But everything else will be on the target drive.

For multi-booting, one option is a boot manager.

Another is a drive switch such as the Trios drive selector.