hard drive setup

hi everyone...

i was wondering for some advice on your harddrive setups and the best way to backup?

currently i have a 300 gb main harddrive and a 150 gb external firewire harddrive. i have all my software installed on the main C:\ drive of course, and then i have all my samples and project files as well as the cakewalk project audio/picture folders on the external 150gb drive and i just backup onto dvd-r's every so often.

i just got a 2nd 300 gb harddrive that i'm going to install. should i copy all the stuff from that 150 gb external onto the new 300 gb drive and make that my project/sample/audio/picture folder drive. and just use the external for backing up my 2nd harddrive (and occasionaly of course still make dvd-r backups as harddrives external or internal can still fail)? also whats the best way to backup, i dont wnat to use some stupid backup program that stores everything in weird compressed files. should i just store all my songs in folders by year and then subfolders by month so that way i just have to go back and copy over each month to my backup drive as i go to the next month? make sense... anyone else do it that way?

thanks for your thoughts/opinions/recommendations... i have an album coming out pretty soon in march... i'll be asking for everyone to check it out when it drops!

coolness... if all goes well i'll have it done by the time i go to sleep tonight... see you all in like probably 6 hours! (i'm also going to sort through the last 100-150 or so instrumentals i've made and create bundle files of all my finished songs and also bounce a bunch to wavs to make myself a new instrumental disc to listen to in my car and love myself )

ORIGINAL: polarbear

wow so ready for this... now for the past 7 years i've never bought a storebought computer, i've always built, but i found this really sweet deal on a gateway recently that had everyhting i wanted for cheaper than i could have configured myself by building... so i picked it up and its been doing a pretty good job for me... so i went to install my 2nd harddrive today.... theres plenty of slots but get this... NO IDE CHANNELS and NO MORE POWER HOOKUPS from the power supply!!! so i know i can get a PCI IDE Controller, but what can i do about the power? theres no more of the 4 big pronged power connectors (sorry i don't know the name for them)... is it at all possible to add another drive to this machine??

oh man... never ever buy gateway... or any low-end dell, there's a reason they are cheap. can you return it? if not, look for some sata adapters on the motherboard. if it doesn't have any (and only one ide channel) then you are pretty much screwed. sorry.

You can get splitters that make one connector into two. Microcenter should have them. Also, can you find the manual and/or specs to your PC online? And how many watts is your power supply, anyway?