How many hard drives can my machine accept?

[Scallyboo]

I recently installed a 5TB drive (E:\) and it is working fine.  The drive I replaced was a  2TB WD drive. Can my old 2TB drive be installed in the bay beneath the DVD player? My machine is p7-1417c , s/n 3CR2460P90. Can my machine operate 2 hard drives in addition to the 1 it came with?

[Jay_101 · Accepted solution]

Greetings,

It appears you have two (maybe three-hard to see) available HDD bays in the HDD cage.

You can also buy a HDD adaptor for the open optical drive bay. Or just attach the 3.5 inch HDD in the bay using screws. if that bay is 2.5 inches you can use an SSD.

You have five SATA ports on the motherboard (MB).

Some of the MB SATA ports are going to be slower legacy speeds. You could have some SATA 1 ports. You might have to use jumpers when installing SATA 3 HDD's. You could have a backwards compatibility problem. It's been awhile since I have had to deal with this type of issue. I am a little fuzzy on possible issues when using SATA 1 on SATA 3 HDD's.

Five MB SATA ports minus the optical drive connection to the MB yields four available connections for HDD's.

You also need power connections (or would have to purchase power adapters) coming from the Power supply to run five drives.

I can't see what you have.

Cheers!

[Scallyboo]

Thanks so much for your reply. Is there an angle I can photograph that would help you help me? Motherboard? Power supply? Other? I see one slot labelled "F Panel" (yellow) which is next to the other SATA plugs. Not sure what parts/cables I would need to buy. Would prefer to do it myself if possible.