ATA100 Controller PCI Card

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hard2Hear
  • Start date Start date
Hard2Hear

Hard2Hear

New member
Just FYI, if you're looking at them.

I bought a Maxtor ATA100 PCI Controller card today, and when I opened it up I found that it is a Promise controller card. I like the Promise cards myself, so it was a good suprise. This leads me to the assmuption that the Maxtor packeged cards are all actually Promise. If you didnt know already, and I didn't.

The unanswered question is...Can I get away with 8 devices since the card has its own bios? We can't figure out that one here. My initial thought is that IDE limits the 4 devices and only SCSI would allow more devices. Anyhows, I'm out of room in this box. On to the next box....

H2H
 
Yes but you're pushing it. If you're really thinking about adding 8 IDE devices, then you might scrap IDE altogether and start looking at SCSI.

Of course this all depends on the devices and how you're going to use them. A two IDE controller setup is great for 4 devices.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Ha Ha! you posted as I was correcting/adding to myself!

Thanks Slack!
 
H2H, you can do 8 devices if you have 4 independant (key work there) controller channels. This means a Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quadriary channel setup. It can be done. I have done it, but I have to say, if you are going to that many drives then SCSI is something to strongly consider.
 
I also have the Maxtor / Promise card and have posted info about it in a few places. Yes it is the exact same thing as a Promise - I have held up both cards to compare them.

DS_Sultan is generally right about IDE drives, but fortunately for H2H is incorrect in this particular case. Because the Maxtor/Promise card has its own hardware BIOS it exists as a seperate entity in your system. Win 9x treats it exactly like a SCSI card - only 1 IRQ and 1 address for the card even if you have it loaded with 4 devices (a master and slave on its primary and secondary controllers). You can also use it to controll a large IDE drive on a motherboard that doesn't support such drives.

The down side of this is that devices attached to the card are only accessable after the Win9x driver has been loaded. So if your Windows becomes corupted and you have to boot from a recovery floppy, anything attached to the card is invisible. So I would not recomend using it for your system (boot) hard drive.
 
IRQ's are a side issue. The real issue is the ability of the IDE architecture to reliably handle even 4 modern devices on a sinlge controller...let alone 8 devices across two controllers. I say no unless maybe you're just acting as a minimal use CDROM server or something...but even that would suck serious ass.

I think DS was trying to say that you can get adequate performance using 4 controllers, two devices per controller. While this might be true, it still wouldn't be as efficient as a single SCSI controller. Too bad that shit is still so expensive...diamonds and harley davidsons man.

But then it really depends on your application doesn't it. If he's got 6 CDROM drives, it'd be silly to cram them all into a machine just for the sake of cramming. I can't think of a single example of devices in a master/slave configuration being anything but a pain in the ass. Avoid slaving devices at all cost...and if you have more than 4 IDE devices, you've probably got something in there that's not really being used....c'mon, admit it! :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
Of course, there's the power supply limitation when you get to that many things also...

BTW- Anyone know where to buy Compaq power supplies retail? An ATX wont fit in a Compaq box.

H2H
 
Contact Compaq directly, they will either ship one to you or give you a phone # where you can get replacement parts.

BTW, it will be expensive. Last one I priced out was $120 Canadian.
 
The most excessive I ever got with IDE was a system with 3 IDE hard drives, a CDR, a CD-ROM, and an IDE Zip drive. Only had a 250 watt PS too, never had a problem with it. But generally I agree that if want to load a bunch of drives in a system you should mortgage the house and go SCSI. And now I only buy cases with 300 watt supplies - you can get a case with PS for $65. Not Compaq of course.....
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top