I want to put more drives (HDD, CD, DVD) to work together in a PC box. How is this usually done? I guess I should find a cable (like that one between HDD and CD/DVD) which has three connectors and just put them all together. Are there any other standard solutions?

If you're talking about a PATA motherboard (probably) then yes, you need an IDE cable. Usually a mobo will have 2-4 IDE connectors on the motherboard. Each of those can support 2 devices. The only trick is making sure your master-slave settings are right.

For more exotic solutions, you can find external hard drives and CD/DVD roms for USB and probably firewire. Or you could get a SATA or PATA expansion card to stick into a PCI slot, then run devices off of that.

(throws a look in the box)
Ah so! Then I should decide which two will be on the first and which one on the second IDE connector. I prefer to copy the things from HDD to DVD drive but as well want to keep communication between CD and other drives.

So here is my guess:
1. Connector: HDD (master), DVD (second switch)
2. Connector: CD (master)

Is there a better solution?

you can communicate to multiple devices on the same chain. However the bandwidth is split between them (sorta, depending on device capabilities).

Unless you plan on doing alot of copying from CD <-> DVD I'd say put the optical drives on the secondary controller.

IDE 1 : HDD (master)
IDE 2: DVD (master), CD-ROM (slave)

The order of master/slave for ide2 doesn't matter. The HDD MUST be IDE 1 master in order to boot. Just to make sure, this is PATA right? That's the very wide parallel cable. SATA is the newer standard and is a serial cable and much thinner. Just want to make sure since SATA doesn't support chaining devices.

Anyway, the setup above will give you the greatest bandwidth from HDD <-> optical drives.

After I saw these two:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q ... a=N&tab=wi
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q ... a=N&tab=wi

I'm sure it is PATA. I'm such a hardware dummy. Nevermind...

Thanks alot.

Actually, its more tricky to make the darn cables reach anywhere if you have a larger box with preset Hdd drawers.

true, if you have a really big case it can sometimes be a bitch getting the cable to reach. Blah, I'm a SATA man now, no more of all that crap. Man I'm so glad parallel cables are pretty much extinct.

Heh... the thing is working now. I made sure that the cables are long enough but there is an other problem - together with FDD cable, two IDE cables can make the box quite messy, if you know what I mean.

Congratulations.

yea, it becomes a cabling nightmare. One of the reason I have only SATA drives and no FDDI in my new boxes. Back in the day I used to ties the cables together using twisty-ties and then shoved it out of the way... maybe twist-tie it to different parts of the case to keep it secure.