IDE controller cards?

L

lucid

New member
i want to use 6 devices when i upgrade to my new computer, but as far as i know the asus a7m266 only supports 4?

3 HDD, zip drive, dvd-rom and cd-rw

how should they be ordered? (Which two on same IDE cable?)

system drive and DVD
audio drive and CD-RW
back-up drive and zip?

is this how it is supposed to work? thanks...
 
Your primary or master cable should have your system HD which you run your audio programs off, and also your CD-R/RW should also be on this cable

Your secondary or slave should have the HD that you'll use for the audio files and also should have your DVD Drive on it as well.

Your third cable should have your backup HD and Zip Drive.

By having the Hard Drives on seperate cables the computer can access them simultaniously when recording. This will run faster rather than having both on the same cable because if you access the first one, the second one on the cable has to wait for the first to finish before it can access it.

Hope that helps

CYA
Tukkis
 
ah ok, thank you for the help.... do you know of any good IDE controller cards?

so my audio PROGRAMS should be run off the system disk? while the actual files save don my audio drive?
 
Sorry, don't much about IDE controller cards.


Yes the audio programs should be run on the system disk and the recorded music should be on the second HD.

Also you should use a 32KB cluster size on your audio Hard Drive.
If it's bigger than 32GB you can make it FAT 32 and make the cluster size 32KB. If it's under 32GB than use have to use FAT 16.
Only do this on the Audio Hard Drive though. This made a considerably improvement on my system because audio files are big so the bigger the cluster size the less clusters the Hard Drive will have to scan so inturn it runs quicker.

CYA
Tukkis
 
Tukkis,
I thought the FAT 16 limit was 2GB. Either way, you should be able to format FAT 32, regardless of HD size, as long as you are using Win98 or WinMe.

IDE controllers...
I have a ABIT Hot Rod Pro ATA100 controller card (with RAID capabilities). It works fine for me (I'm just using it as a controller, not doing the RAID thing...). A lot of people had problems with the HPT370 chip (on this card and many MOBOs) and Maxtor drives. I believe those issues have been resolved, but cannot comment from personal experience, as I don't have a Maxtor HD.

One more thing, I believe that my card specified that you only use it for ATA66+ devices, and recommended against using it for CDROM, CDRW, etc. You should check that before you buy a card that it will support those types of devices.

I've heard people swear up and down that the Promise IDE cards are the best. I don't have any personal experience with Promise cards.

Queue
 
I have Promise Ultra66 controller that I've had for two years now and it runs like a top...
 
so promise soudns like a good brand then.. will look into that thanks...

i have a zip drive because i can trasnfer files easily with friends then without having to burn cd's all the time.
 
I stopped using ZIP disks when my drive developed the "click of death" 4 years ago and lost alot of work and data at the time. I have never trusted an Iomega product since then.

I'll just stick with my CD-RW since media is cheap ($.40/CD) and I can burn 700Mb in around 10mins with my 10x burner.
 
Promise is a good brand for an IDE card. Maxtor also sells the Promise cards under the Maxtor label, sometimes for less $$$.

I think Tukkis meant 16K clusters, not FAT16, which no sane person uses anymore. In XP (and I think 2000 as well) you are limited to 32 gig partitions if you use FAT32, for no good reason except Microsoft wants people using the NTFS file system instead.

I strongly agree with Tukkis about the devices, have your CDR paired with your boot (system) hard drive, and have your large audio data drive on a different controller.
 
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