PCI Slot extender possible?

[The_Construct]

I have a dilemma:

4 PCI Slots but 7 cards to put in them.

Proposition:

Extend PCI slot/slots to front drive bay for fast swapping of cards.

Would the electronic signals be strong enought to reach the lenth of the case?

[rtyp3]

Sorry, I don't have an answer.
I was just kind of wondering how you plan on doing this?

[800XL]

The idea could be done, but it would not be cost effective at all. In order to bridge that distance, you would need some rather expensive cabling or there would be signal loss and noise. Many of the motherboards you see with slots on a riser card (LPX and NLX form factor) have trouble with noise on the PCI bus, and that is a circuit board plugged right into the motherboard. A cable would be even worse.

A cheaper solution would be to buy several more machines and not try to do everything in one box. How can you manage to come up with 7 PCI cards to use in one machine anyway? http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

[Obsolete]

1. Voodoo2
2. Voodoo2
3. TV tuner Card
4. Sound Card
5. PCI modem
6. NIC
7. SCSI
8. Possibly a secondary Video card for Dual monitor
9+. More video cards

I came up with that list in about 10 seconds
who knows what other devices this guy could have.

[Konan555]

There is a limit to the amount of devices you can have on a PCI bus - I think it's 10 on a normal board.

Thats not 10 card either, ISA takes up 2 places, hard disk controller takes up 1 (or 2 with ATA66) etc...

[EKrzycki]

Try http://www.bit3.com/cp_expansion.shtml...
Not cheap...

[Ruahrc]

Just wondering:

What is NIC? I have racked my brain but it can't figure it out. Maybe because it's so late...

Dumb question but please answer

Thanks

Ruahrc

[800XL]

Network Interface Card

aka network card, ethernet card, etc. Now someone quick, start talking about DACs so we can continue to sound cryptic with our acronyms.

(DAC: Drive/Disk Array Controller, also known as a RAID card, SCSI card, anything in between)

[Konan555]

erm....

I was thinking DAC - Digital to Analouge Converter..... mmmmmmmmmm acronyms

[Axel]

hotswap PCI bay - nifty - thing is the drivers aren't hotswap and often conflict. There are hot-swap drivers for devices such as drives, so the technology exists....

I just can't imagine wanting to hot-swap PCI devices. But then there was "Bill" indicating that no-one would ever need more than 64KB of space.......right.....

What I see happening is more USB stuff - no internal card at all - the card is built into the device and all you need is the bus link to make it work with other devices.

CPU-s will start looking like a network hub with multiple processors in it. Instead of USB or RJ-45 ports, we'll most likely need to go to fiber for the bus speeds this will need.

And it's unlikely there will be media - most likely everything will be on licensed down-loads with time-outs built in. You don't pay your licensing fee - the program erases itself off your drive space.