Not enough IDE ports

[Jonathan Hirschman]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> There's a good chance that my next motherboard won't have enough IDE
> ports, and I've got too much IDE hardware to junk it and buy SATA. 
There are PATA<->SATA converters. They allow you to use your PATA 
devices on SATA. This may or may not be appealing, and I cannot testify 
to how well they work.

> How
> well do PCI cards that add IDE ports work? Any known gotchas?
They generally work fine. Gotchas? That's very brand and chipset 
specific. Promise won't allow you to have more than three of their cards 
in a box - their onboard BIOS serves as a form of copy protection (they 
want to sell you RAID cards). Not cool.

>  Does the
> OS see them as different from the M/B's IDE ports?
Shouldn't be different at all; you may or may not be able to boot from a 
device on the card, depending upon the card and your PC's BIOS.

>  Specifically, I
> need to run two DVD burners and two 400 GB hard drives, all IDE, on a
> motherboard with one IDE controller and one SATA controller.
You have a motherboard with ONE PATA connector and ONE SATA, and that's 
it? Wow, that's nasty.

>  Should
> the hard drives be on the M/B, and the burners (rarely used) on the
> card, or vice versa?
>   
I'd think that putting the burners on the card make the most sense. You 
may have boot issues that way.

I'd look for a four port card. You'll get best performance if all of 
your devices have their own port, so moving a non-boot HD to the card 
along with the burners would be advisable.

jh


> Thanks in advance.
>
> Dotan Cohen
>
> http://what-is-what.com
> http://gibberish.co.il
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