still using ide hard drives?

[Chewy]

put them on a controller card

http://www.chiefvalue.com/product/productdetails.aspx?item=16-132-005&CMP=EMC-F110306

not really for optical drives? but can work in multiword dma 2

[Abuilder]

Chewy
Have you actually tried that “Rosewill” card?

[Chewy]

familiar with the chipset and several bought the older raid model

I read all the reviews, some guy has like 8 drives running off 2 of them(newegg to read the reviews)

pity is the non-standard epprom used by rosewill won't let you downgrade the
firmware to run dvd burners in full dma mode

[Abuilder]

Chewy
Thanks for the info. I used some other Rosewill components a couple years back and they put a bad taste in my mouth so I avoided Rosewill since. But never tried any of there controllers.
Thanks!

[Chewy]

you can get burned with the expensive stuff also, some of my promise and highpoint purchases have been pain in the asses. bad driver disks, old firmware, etc

false promises from Promise about atapi support

[toomanycats]

Why is a controller card better than the board slots? I am completely ignorant of this subject matter and would gladly take advice.

[Abuilder]

cats
Although They are IDE controllers, the firmware that is on those cards act much like a SCSI controller do. It is a independant controller, so they don't take any CPU power to run your drives. Much faster!

[Chewy]

some people have added a hard drive and an optical drive to their computers,
all cables are full and they are sharing. any operation that happens is slower if the 2 drives on a cable are trying to communicate,
with a controller card you would use 4 cables and set all drives master(standalone master rules).

[Abuilder]

you can get burned with the expensive stuff also, some of my promise and highpoint purchases have been pain in the asses. bad driver disks, old firmware, etc

false promises from Promise about atapi support

Chewy
That is all so true. I have had whole batchs of bad ASUS mobos.
Maybe I will give Rosewell another shot. Hell back when I had problems with there stuff they didn't even have a web site yet. Yikes!!!!

[mill]

How much more would another hard drive tax the power supply?

[Abuilder]

mill
If the system has ,at the very least, a 350 watt PS in it. Not enough to cause any problems.

[mill]

Thanks for the info Abuilder

[toomanycats]

I have 3 hard drives and 1 DVD burner. Would the IDE Controller tell me where to put the Hard drives or should I leave the master Hard drive connected to the board? What would be the best route to go?

[Chewy]

In your case just move the 2 non boot drives to the card on seperate cables,
leave the boot drive on the motherboard primary and dvd burner on secondary.

[toomanycats]

Thanks Chewy!!