Okay, Help Please

[Valek]

Hello Guys and Gals, I'm back again.

I have a couple of Questions and need some advice. I am building a new system and am considering going with the P4 and the Intel 850 chipset. It seems that the concurrent problem with all the boards I have looked at, with the exception of the Abit TH7 is that they all have 2 IDE controllers. The primary is an ATA 100 controller and the second is a standard one. Well, that's great if all you are going to run is a HDD and a CDROM. But, what if...like me...you have a CD ROM and a CDRW? Since IDE channels don't multi-task you can't very well have both CDROM and CDRW on the same IDE Channel, and in order to get optimum performance you would have to put the CDROM on the same IDE channel as the HDD. Can this be done with one of these boards? Can a CDROM even be PUT on an ATA100 controller and function? If so then my worries are over and I'll go with the Asus P4T-E board (I'm not knocking Abit EXCEPT that the board does not have an AGP Pro slot...so it's automatically disqualified because of my Video Card).

It just seems so odd to me that such a pricey board and Processor would provide their users with more options to have more IDE devices connected.

Thanks for all your help Everybody.

Valek

[Philip1952]

On raid boards they do not recommend any optical drives to be installed. I normaly put all hard drives on the raid controller then leave the opticals on the IDE 1&2. With the new burnproof on the newer drives. You can do burns if you don't try to be to intensive with other app's.

[BipolarBill]

Yup...HDDs on the ATA/100 controller and optical on IDE. If you need more, consider a Promise UDMA card or real SCSI.

It's pretty much industry-standard to arrange IDE the way that Asus did on the P4T. To whose board are you comparing it?

[Philip1952]

Look into SCSI. With the speed of CPU's getting so high. IDE is getting to slow for them.
I am on a P4 1.9 right now. With an Abit TH7 nonraid. When I had a WD 30 gig on this box. It was sluggish. Now I use a Atlas 2 10K SCSI drive. The box is more responsive and smoother. Plus you aren't limited by the amount of IDE devices you can use anymore. With a dual channel card. You can mix and match up to 30 devices.
With the WD 30 gig in this box the transfer rate was 20 mps With the Atlas it is 40 mps.
I have built three of these boxes with different HDD's in them
#2 had a P4 1.7 with a 40 gig WD transfer was 24 MPS
#3 has a P4 1.6 with a IBM 40 gig 60GXP transfer was 21 mps

These tests were done with HDtach just after the build. Only programing was windows with all updates. I.E. 5.5 and DirectX8.1.
Nothing else on the drives with a fresh defrag.
Mine has win98. The other two have 98SE.