any way to have more than 4 ide drives?

[Tarzan]

i have 2 hdd's and 1 cdrom and 1 cdr....i'd like to add a dvdrom but i'm outta ide space. will a scsi cure my problem?

[Joel Kleppinger]

Well, SCSI is always an option, but you'll have to upgrade at least some of your current stuff to SCSI. IMO, the one thing that would benefit most from being SCSI is the CD burner. I will never understand why God created IDE burners.

The other alternative is to buy a controller like the Abit HotRod66 or Promise FastTrack which will add on 4 IDE ports to your system. The HotRod66 adds 4 ATA/66 ports, and the FastTrack will add 4 ATA/66 or ATA/33 ports, depending on which version you buy.

[KillerBug]

It might just be the one I bought, but my IDE/33 PCI add-on card dissabled my on board stuff. I am going to get a ATA/66, I have 2 hard drives, a CD, a DVD, and I have a linux drive all set up in a 486 system, but I might be eliminating a few old systems, I need more space.

[BBA]

ATA66 add on card!

BBA

[MadMatt]

The Abit BP6 has support for 4 ATA33 devices AND 4 ATA66 devices.

[AuraEdge]

Ditto with the BE6 Matt!
I got so much stuff i wanna sell or wish i never bought cuz theres better alternatives i want..such as my IDE Burner or my BH6 or my normal sized case which i can just squeeze my alpha P125 into =P I swear its sucha tight fit its touching my power supply!. Well i have 2 friens itching to build celeron machines so maybe i can second hand em to em for a moderate fee http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif. Say, If i got an ATA66 Burner (assuming they exist) and i have no other ATA66 devices, it would be just as good as an SCSI burner?

[Tarzan]

i'm not sure about ATA66 burners, but i've read up on the ATA66 add-card. it looks very impressive. the reviews says it's just it give SCSI quality for less. here's the link and and find Hot Rod 66. http://www.abit-usa.com/english/index.htm
thanx for the replies, it looks like this is the way i'll go.

T

[Vidfreek]

The ATA66 burner would be about 26 meg per second faster than the scsi one, that is of course if they make one. Ultra wide scsi only supports 40 megs per second transfer rates and ATA66 does 66 megs per second, hence the name of course. I just grabbed a new BE6 motherboard and let me tell you, ATA66 is one fast mofo, my levels in games load in like a second and games like half-life that have that little load time in between sections of the game takes about 5 seconds to load the next part. Some stuff seems to load the same, but most of it loads really fast now.

[Stan]

Tarzan: buy a Promise FastTrak.

You can indeed add another 4 devices but, the most important feature of that card is that it is a RAID card (0 or 1).
Abit BP6 might be a speedy mobo, but it will NEVER be faster than the raid 0 config on my Gigabyte BX2000 mobo (with 2 IBM 22GXP, 2Mb cache, 7200rpm).

Stan

[Moe]

As far as fast mofos go, I've got a BP6 with an Adaptec 2940U2W with dual celerys at 560 which is just screaming along.

If I were in your situation, I might use the DVD-ROM and take the cdrom out (if the speeds were comparable). As far as I know the DVD-ROM will be able to read CDs at a decent speed.


As far a burners in general go, even the fastest burners would almost never use 10+mb/sec, think about it the fastest burners (currently avail) write a 8x which is 1.2 MB per sec, they will certainly not be pulling 66MB/s or 40MB/s or any other ridculous amount across a bus.

I've got a PlexWriter 8x writer (Fast SCSI, oh no only 10mb/s), and haven't had a single burn error yet (made 10+ full CDs).