The simplest way to do this would be to use a PCI hard drive controller card, like the Promise brand.  All you need is a spare PCI slot. 

This type of card is not SATA (serial ATA) and runs regular IDE drives, including CDRom.

I used one for several years when I wanted to run more than four drives.  My Promise card had two ports, which doubled my motherboard's capacity and would have enabled me to run eight drives in total.   

As far as I'm aware, the only downside to using one of these,  is that you won't be able to run a drive in DOS.  The card only kicks in when Windows loads, at least that's the way it was with my card.

However, if it's essential to have DOS access to a hard drive, it's usually possible to shuffle them around so that the particular drive is run from the mobo
 
Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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The NOSPIN Group
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  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Kay McCoy 
  Subject: [PCBUILD] five IDE drives?


  Is there a way to hook up five IDE devices to a PC?   The computer already
  has two hard drives and two CD drives (one a burner).

  Thanks for any help.

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