5th IDE Device

[DVD_Ripper]

Hey all,

i've got 2 ide HD's and 2 IDE CD/DVD Devices... I need more drives... can I put a 5th drive in with a secondary IDE controller?

How bad will that mess with my primary controllers, DMA settings (DMA5 now on my HD's... very fast)

[reboot]

Add an ATA100 card, and put the hard drives on that. They allow 4 more devices, but most will NOT work with optical drives (cd-rom/burner/etc.).
I have all my hard drives on the card, and all my opticals on the motherboard IDE, with room for more
They won't mess with your current DMA settings at all. If you simply want to add a drive, get the card, plug it in, and mount the drive. Leave your current setup the way it is. It will also run DMA5 easily.

[andyp1]

I don't know if you have Maplin in The States , I got one of these in UK.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search/AdvSearch.asp?Criteria=raid&CartID=040602211503587
Really easy to fit , I left my boot HD on IDE1 Master on MB and DVD Burner on IDE2 Master , other than that I don't think it matters.
This card is a raid card but not removing a link on the card means it is just an expansion card , it supports upto ATA133 ond very large HD's .

Once I'd installed it and swopped drives around and added a couple of HD's , I did have to reactivate windows XP as it considered what I had done to be a major change.

FYI You can only have 2 drives per IDE channel a master and a slave on each cable.

[stiltman]

Hey all,

i've got 2 ide HD's and 2 IDE CD/DVD Devices... I need more drives... can I put a 5th drive in with a secondary IDE controller?

How bad will that mess with my primary controllers, DMA settings (DMA5 now on my HD's... very fast)

Only 2 IDE devices to an IDE channel

Look above for internal IDE options
Or get a firewire/USB external drive

[Capmaster]

Here in the states Promise has some very inexpensive IDE controllers:

http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.asp?familyId=3

[rallynavvie]

Your board would have to support booting from a hardware IDE card in order to put all HDDs on the card and leaving optical drives on the onboard controllers. Unless you used a boot disc all the time I guess. I know my Tyan wouldn't allow me to boot from a PCI bus device. Many current ones do. If you don't already own the drive maybe look around for one of those hard drives on sale that package an ATA or SATA controller with them. Another thing to consider is if you ever want to RAID most RAID controllers also act as plain old ATA controllers as well. RAID controllers are pretty cheap these days. I used a Promise RAID card to run the extra hard drives in my old PC without RAIDing them.

[enstg8er]

i dual boot off a tekram scsi card with 4 10k drives. i also use a promise ata 100 card for 3 ide drives, and put my optical drives on the mb. the promise card does support optical drives.

[redwudz]

I use the Promise TX2 133 IDE contoller, works with CD, DVD drives and 133 HD's. Cheap at about $35US. Easy way to add extra IDE devices.