My documentation also shows 4 ports. When I looked at my mother board there is only 2. I also emailed tech support and they replied that I can only have 2 SATA hard drives. I think I am going to take this question higher in Dell management. I defianatly ordered a Gen 3.
Yes if you phsically only have 2, it means you got the wrong mother board installed. I had a similar problem once on a custom made computer serveral years ago where they installed the wrong MB, took me a while before I discovered it. The builder did replace it without any problems.
How many IDE channels do you have. You should only have 1, but if you got a Gen 2 board it would have 2.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my posts. Upon further looking I do have 2 more serial ATA connectors on my mother board. What I don’t understand is why Dell support would say I cannot add a 3rd SATA hard drive. All I want to use it for is extra storage separate from the Raid configuration.
I think all you have do is install the drive, hook up the cable. On boot up rght click My Computer and select Manage. The disk manager is an option off there, you can create and format the partition from there. Do not think you have to enable it in the BIOS, but I may be wrong. I think, if you could mount a 4th drive, you could have 2 RAID volumes. But there is only 3 drive bays anyway. On My XPS gen 2, I have a 3rd IDE drive. The other 2SATA drives are RAID 1.
TomXPS
1.3K Posts
0
December 22nd, 2004 19:00
Samerus
3 Posts
0
December 23rd, 2004 13:00
Message Edited by Samerus on 12-23-2004 09:57 AM
TomXPS
1.3K Posts
0
December 23rd, 2004 16:00
Yes if you phsically only have 2, it means you got the wrong mother board installed. I had a similar problem once on a custom made computer serveral years ago where they installed the wrong MB, took me a while before I discovered it. The builder did replace it without any problems.
How many IDE channels do you have. You should only have 1, but if you got a Gen 2 board it would have 2.
Samerus
3 Posts
0
December 23rd, 2004 19:00
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my posts. Upon further looking I do have 2 more serial ATA connectors on my mother board. What I don’t understand is why Dell support would say I cannot add a 3rd SATA hard drive. All I want to use it for is extra storage separate from the Raid configuration.
TomXPS
1.3K Posts
0
December 23rd, 2004 22:00
I think all you have do is install the drive, hook up the cable. On boot up rght click My Computer and select Manage. The disk manager is an option off there, you can create and format the partition from there. Do not think you have to enable it in the BIOS, but I may be wrong. I think, if you could mount a 4th drive, you could have 2 RAID volumes. But there is only 3 drive bays anyway. On My XPS gen 2, I have a 3rd IDE drive. The other 2SATA drives are RAID 1.