IDE Controller Card

[jeremyp969]

Ok, long story short, I would like to have 5 IDE drives on my computer, 1 DVD+-RW, 1 DVD-ROM, 1 CD-RW, and 2 hard drives.

However, my motherboard only supports two IDE channels, so my thought was to use an IDE controller card. Has anyone used these before? I've just recently heard about them and was wondering how well they work and if anyone has any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jeremy

[§kipTracer65]

eh as far is i know most modern mother boards support 4 ide drives primary master, primary slave secondary master secondary slave, so ud save ur self some money if u just ditched the dvd rom because ur dvd+/- rw will cover its loss would i not?

[jeremyp969]

eh as far is i know most modern mother boards support 4 ide drives primary master, primary slave secondary master secondary slave, so ud save ur self some money if u just ditched the dvd rom because ur dvd+/- rw will cover its loss would i not?

Well I could of course ditch either the DVD-ROM or the CD-RW because the DVD+-RW drive will double as both. However, I don't want to burn out the motor by having the DVD+-RW drive handle the DVD ripping also. And I burn A LOT of cd's so I don't want to have to have the DVD+- RW handle CD burning either.

[noki]

From what I understand an add-on card (PCI IDE Controller) has its own BIOS and thus can add to your existing arsenal of devices. Only precaution is to NOT place any optical drives (ie DVD Rom or burners) on it. Your optical drive will still work, but at a slower rate. Place your HDD there instead.

[MikeV]

You could also use an external box for the DVD-ROM. Use either USB2.0 or Firewire(IEEE-1394). The IDE controllers have been out for years, use one of the newer 133 controllers. The internal controller idea depends on how much space (for drives), power supply wattage, and cooling you have in the computer case.

[BobK]

I've been using an ATA Controller card (133) for about 6 months with no problems. Mine plugs into an empty PCI slot- it has two IDE sockets so you could plug in up to 4 devices. I have a CD writer and a DVD ROM on one cable and a 2nd HD on the other.

I haven't seen any difference in speed in the devices on the card vs the ones plugged into the motherboard. That doesn't mean there is no difference, but if there is it's not signifcant to anything I do.

Most of the cards I've seen run around $40-$50. But if you have any plans to add another hard drive then I seen a lot of Western Digital drives come with a free controller card.

[ktton]

But if you have any plans to add another hard drive then I seen a lot of Western Digital drives come with a free controller card.

yeah, I am using a western digital 160gb drive with the free controller card and it works great.

[jeremyp969]

But if you have any plans to add another hard drive then I seen a lot of Western Digital drives come with a free controller card.

yeah, I am using a western digital 160gb drive with the free controller card and it works great.

hmmm, thanks for the info guys, didn't know they came free with some WD drives. I might have to look into that.

[Gazorgan]

I've never had an issue running opticle drives from a add-on card. If your going to do a lot of ripping, then you will want a HD and a DVDROM on the card. The idea is to keep the data from bouncing across the buss.

IDE has high overhead compared to SCSI, but is a lot cheaper.

You could do very well with a USB 2.0 card and enclosure. Cost you less than $100, and put your CDRW in there. You could then add a big external drive for bulk storage later.

I strongly encourage you not to exceed 2 HD's and 2 optical drives in any case thats less than a full tower size. 400 Watt supply as well. Filling your case is a real good way to overheat, and overheating causes some insidous problems (errors in optical read/writes, degraded drive perfomrance, CPU errors, and failures). Cooling generally isnt' an issue with 1 HD and 1 optical. When you have 9 drives and 3 opticals....it's a major concern (but that's why there are leaf blowers!!!! or at leat that how it sounds with the case off).

[GKar]

You can find a Maxtor/Promise ATA133 type controller on www.Ebay.com for less than $25 delivered. ATA100's and ATA66's are even cheaper. Maxtor also has some hard drives with controllers included and they are also on Ebay for auction.
*Always pay with credit card for your protection.

[ktton]

I strongly encourage you not to exceed 2 HD's and 2 optical drives in any case thats less than a full tower size. 400 Watt supply as well. Filling your case is a real good way to overheat, and overheating causes some insidous problems (errors in optical read/writes, degraded drive perfomrance, CPU errors, and failures). Cooling generally isnt' an issue with 1 HD and 1 optical. When you have 9 drives and 3 opticals....it's a major concern (but that's why there are leaf blowers!!!! or at leat that how it sounds with the case off).

Yeah, I initially had 4 hard drives, 1 dvd-rom, 1 dvd-rw in my computer. I also have a 350 Watt power supply. Then a strange thing happened. My computer just hung and there was a weird sound coming out of my speakers. I did not know why but after checking the website of the manufacture of my motherboard. it was either overheat or weak power supply problem. So I removed a hard drive and put it in an usb2 external enclosure. The usb2 external enclosure works great. My computer did not hang as much but still did hang sometimes. So I put 2 more fans in there. One is a regular fan, another is a exhaust fan attach to an open slot. No more hanging, no more overheat for me.

[jeremyp969]

Hmm, that's a good point about it overheating maybe the better option would be for me to buy a DVD-ROM CD-RW combo drive. I just looked up the LiteOn drive which doesn't look too bad, i mean it's cheap, and I don't really need top of the line. Has anyone used this? What exactly is "SMART-BURN?" Is that the same as burn proof? I'm talking about the LiteOn 48161. Only about $45.

Thanks for all the help!

[§kipTracer65]

i actually use that model liteon drive, it may be cheap but it has never ever let me down as opposed to the sony 1 an idiot lent me b4 i got it

[myckee]

I have a full tower case and have had a promise ide controller for the past couple of years. On the card I had 4 hard drives and on the onboard ide I had one hard drive, a dvd-rom, dvd+rw and a cd-rw. I have a full tower case and a 450W power supply. I also have 5 fans in my case besides the 2 in the power supply itself. I have never had a cooling issue, and while it isn't silent, its not obnoxiously loud.

Long story short, and ide controller card is a great way to pump up to 4 more hard drives or optical drives into your system, and are generally faster than the on board bus. My ata 100 card was faster than my on board ata 100 and the ata 133 card of course was faster than on board.

[noki]

thanks for correcting my reply of slower speeds if optical drives were used on the add-on controller. passing along info from another thread where someone experienced slower ripping and burning speed, but was corrected when the drive was installed on the on-board IDE.

[overloaded_ide]

Extenal firewire is good if you want it, but if you want internal go with the card, and it's cheaper since you add 4 devices with one card, compared to 4 external cases for 4 external devices. Though I plan to start using those too thanks to Villages advice on other subjects.

Why would a PCI ATA 133 controller be "SLOWER" than an optical drive which is only a 66 device?? That one I don't think I beleave yet.

Get an ATA 133 promise controller card if you want more internal drives and have a large power supply! About $40 maybe less at newegg.com and you can add 4 more drives if you want. Or get a card free with a drive if you find that deal! I bought my "MAXTOR" card off e-bay for $21 including shipping. I have looked closely at this card and many pics of the promise card and other than the painted on name they look exactly the same!

One of the things to think on is how often are you using all the drives at once? CD/DVD drives and burners only use power when in use, so if your only using 2 at a time it doesn't matter if 4 or 6 are connected! Now if your building a duplicater and would be having 7 burners running at the same time that is different!
If you like the drives you have now, get the card for future expansion also, replacing a drive doesn't allough for expansion latter.

I have 3 maxtor HDs, 60gig, 120gig, and just added 160gig yesterday.
I am changing my opticals. 1 DVDburner, 1 DVDrom, 1 combo DVDrom cd burner 48x24x48x. With this combination I can do disk to disk copies for DVD or CD if I want, and the DVD burner is used only for burning DVDs! DVD rom is for general use of DVDs or CDs, playing music, ripping, watching movies, playing games, installing software ect...
Other than for testing I don't expect to do DVD- DVDr copies though.
I will be doing CDs for bands once in awhile that way though.

There are often times when it is nice to have more than 2 drives, even though 1 or 2 do everything. Like if I want to listen to a cd I don't want ripped to my system and want to play a game at the same time that requires a CD, one combo drive won't cut it! I don't game alot, but when I do, that's what I do. I don't use my DVD burner for that either!

If you have a decent sized case with enough room for all these drives then heat should not be an issue. You should also have places to add more fans! Fans are like $1.50 and up! I buy alot of low cost ones from bestbuy.net and never had a problem with them. Look at the DBA rating if your concerned about noise, lower is better, look at the cfm for the amount of air it moves, higher is better. Find a nice average and add a couple if needed!
2900RPM, 41CFM, 34dBA, Sleeve bearing 20k hour MTBF is not bad, $1.50 each or $13.50 for 10, plain black nothing fancy. I use these for the front case fans that aren't seen anyway, none have failed yet, oldest is a couple years and I live with major dust off a dirt road! System is on about 18hrs day most the time! If one does fail no big deal, only $1.35 and I have spares!
I use better fancier more expensive fans sometimes for the CPU heat sink and rear fans that are seen. You can also get temp sensing fans that adjust speeds themselfs for about $10 or less! Put those at the rear for exhaust fans if you use them since the air comming in the front is always cooler!
It's the temp of the air leaving the case or power supply that effects the temp sensors to adjust proper speeds, not the air going in! In rebuilding systems for others I see that mistake at times, tempsenser fans for cool incomming air?? Those always run the lowest speed, so why bother?

A good low cost power supplie of about 450watts or higher should do well, make sure it is also cooled. Mine has a fan at the rear and in the bottom.

For cooling my Hardrives I have one fan in front blowing onto the 3 drives, they are cool to the touch even after heavy use! I just transeferd 70gigs from the 120gig to the 160gig at one time, and touching the drives you couldn't even tell they had been running! How often do you work drives that hard??
No need for those fancy drive coolers, though some look nice and they do work well too.

If a system hangs it's most likely CPU heat problem or a poor power supply. Add a better fan to the CPU or use a better heat sink. You should be able to monitor either with software that came with the system board or in Bios for any newer boards. Check when first booted for CPU temp, since all boards read differently there is no correct temp, some show hot some show cool. SO look at boot up temps after it's runnng and idle, but before it has a chance to rise durring use, then check durring use and see how much it has rose. If it is 5degrees your ok, if it was 25degrees you need better cooling for sure!!
If your system monitors case temps too, they should be close to the same.
If not add another $1.50 fan

Your power to the cpu should not float alot, it doesn't have to stay the exact same numbers, but it should stay very close!

Most mid tower and full tower cases have room for more fans than people normally use. So instead of one or two leaf blowers, use a couple extra ones that are quite.

This summer my house was often 90-95f and I never had heat problems with my systems, though I had a few myself! I don't like air conditioning, though this year we did break down and buy a large window unit. Sometimes it hit 100+ in this tin box trailer house, so we used it then!
Though the wife was complaing alot, my systems never said a word!!

My main box is a 1700xp slightly over clocked as a 2000xp, 2 are stock 1700xp, the 4rth but seldom used is a 2000xp.

[jeremyp969]

overloaded_ide thanks for the answer. I appreciate you taking the time to answer, very helpful information everybody.

overloaded_ide brought up a good point, I doubt I'll ever be using all the drives at once, so it might not get that hot in there. I have a mid tower enlight case, so I could add probably 1-2 more fans. I probably would never be doing a DVD-DVD copy directly, I would put it on the hard drive first so I might be ok with it.

I guess I gotta decide which route I want to go, I dont' really want an external enclosure just because I would have to go buy a USB 2.0 card because I have an old MB. So it's either a DVD combo drive or an IDE controller card.

The only reason I'm leaning slightly toward getting the combo drive is my cd-burner is ancient and starting to crap out. Actually while we're on the topic maybe someone can answer that questions. I have a AMD 900Mhz CPU(I know, nothing impressive but I should be able to burn CD's without a problem). When I burn CD's from shn's or even from wav files it uses almost 100% of the CPU. Now I don't really know why it does this but I"m worried about getting a dvd-burner and having my processor not be able to handle it. I had posted before about a problem with Nero6 and getting buffer underruns because of this problem. I don't think anyone is going to be able to diagnose my cd-burner problem, but does anyone run with a CPU as ancient as mine? And if so does anyone have trouble burning DVD's? I realize that with the buffer underrun protection Im' not going to burn coasters because of it, but I want to be able to get the full 4x out of my burner.

Thanks for all the help!

[redwudz]

jeremyp969: Just to add my 2 cents. I use a promise TX2 PCI IDE controller and it works great. Make sure any controller you buy will work with CD, DVD drives. I bought a IDE 133 controller that would only work with HD's. I learned the hard way. Fortunatelly it was cheap. I run 2 HD's, a RAID, a ZIP drive, a CD burner, A DVD rom and a DVD burner with a good quality 300w power supply with no problems. DVD burners are often locked to a lower speed for ripping, that is why I use a seperate DVD rom. Nothing against combo drives, but look at the specs. first. If you have the room and the power supply, I would prefer seperate drives. Just my opinion.

[gmatov]

An ATA 100 and an ATA 133 are not going to go faster than an ATA 66 on an ATA 66 board.. You can transfer data to the buss, but if the buss cannot go any faster, it will not go faster.

Get an ATA 133 board if you want to transfer data faster. Why the hell do you want to, innyhoo?

What are you doing that is so important?

Cheers,

George

As an edit, they will see an optical drive, but it will be at optical ddrive speed,what AEA 33? Faster than an optical can put out.

[jdizzy40]

Any WD Drive above 120 gig comes with a free ATA card, at least in the States. Otherwise Windows XP can't see any thing above 136 gig. I have used ATA cards for past 18months with no problems. Adds another thing your computer has to find during bootup, but works like a champ.

[noki]

jeremyp969

i have a P3-933 and have no problems burning dvdrs with NEC 1300a. using CopytoDVD 2.37 or Nero 5.510.42 cpu utilization is less than 10%. i've even (mistakenly) ran Shrink while burning...burn took much longer but was successful (as was the shrink-job).

[jgandara]

Windows XP can't see any thing above 136 gig

You must install sp1 and your motherbaord must also support drives avobe that size.

An add on card works fine, you shouldn't have any speed problem, if you have, then your card is defective. I had an adaptec card that came with my HD and it was defective.

Buy a brand card. You can get some cheaper at ebay.

I have these drives in my computer:
+2 120GB in board IDE
+ DVD writer and DVD-ROM in board IDE
+ 1 28GB, 1 60GB, 1 120GB and 1 200GB in my add on pci card, and everything works fine!.

Also I have an external 120GB drive
[/quote]

[maveric4001]

sorry guys to but in but very interesting post as I am considering and add on card myself . Just a question if any of you recomended a specific card which would it be, one that would be happy with both hdds and opticals.

Jgandara is it imperitive to have SP1 installed to run this card what happens if you dont have it installed.

Also can someone explain the difference between an ata133 card and raid, which is better.

Thanks guys

[BobK]

I've used an SIG card and a card that was included with a WD hard drive. I don't have SP1 installed and both still worked fine with both HDs and opticals.

[lordsmurf]

I use a Promise TX2 Ultra ATA card and have 7 devices in my system: 4 hard drives and 3 optical drives.

- Do not ditch the CD-R, as the DVD burners' CD lasers suck.
- Do not ditch the DVD-ROM as the ripping speeds on a DVD burner sucks.
- Do not worry about "over-extending" your system

I do not suggest RAID for video capture. Tried that once, big mistake. Stick with Ultra ATA and DMA mode on a 7200 drive, and you're fine.

The idea that a 66 device and a 133 device on a 133 speed card would make both devices run at 66 is 100% FALSE! At least on the Promise TX2 cards and a few others. The device will run at FULL SPEED.. REGARDLESS of the other item's speed on the same IDE cable.

I have a 350W power supply, no problems.

I wouldn't trade this system for anything...

[gf]

Hi jeremyp969,
I had a problem with my Pioneer and Via 686B chipset not letting me write dvd's. Put the dvd in another computer and it worked fine. I bought a WD 180 GB 7200 rpm drive and it came with a Promise FastTrak100 TX2 controller. So I installed it in the computer and connected the Pioneer to it now it works and in Ultra dma2 mode. And most of all NO DVD ERRORS!!!

Hope this helps
Steve

[TBoneit]

On the other hand I have seen perosnally and seen reports too, that at least some of the Promise cards have problems with burners.

It drove me crazy that a cd burner that had been workinf perfectly suddenly kept having buffer underruns so that burnproof had to kick in and took 3 times as long to burn as a result. Plus high CPU usage.

Then I realized the burner had been shifted to the Promise card in the last reconfguration and testing by putting it back on the MoBo cured the problem.

Ever since I have two HDs and Two opticals on the MoBo, two more on the Add in IDE and an external USB2.0 CD-RW

No more problems. I mention this FWIW.
Cheers

[gf]

Hi TBoneit,
You are right, when I called Promise they said "it is a IDE controller and they it will controll most ATAPI devices, if it doesn't work bring it back to where you bought it". But in my case it works, connected to my motherboard Ulead's dvd movie factory would burn a dvd a little, stop, then give me a error message. It would work very intermittent. I have a dvd rom on the same cable and it worked fine. So i guess this board is not a cure all, but for me it did.

[lordsmurf]

The TX2 is not great for burning.
I use it for reading and hard drives only.

[gf]

Hi lordsmurf,
So what card do you think I should try??