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Need more IDE/ATA slots! How about PCI/ATA card?

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BSell

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Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The 'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
 
BSell,

Why do you need separate DVD reader, CD Burner, and DVD Burner? The DVD burner will do all of that. Why not just get rid of your old CD Burner? (assuming you want to have two DVD's.)

pschatz100
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
 
I've been using Promise Ultra 100Tx2 cards (about $30) to add extra IDE drives to my computers. Either for your situation (need more IDE drives than the motherboard will support) or to add large drives to old computers that have BIOSs that don't support large drives.

For maximum speed, you should use a separate IDE channel for each drive. So you are already losing speed by putting four drives on two IDE channels. When I had your problem and I wanted to add a third drive to my desktop machine, I added a Promise controller and put the new drive on it. But I didn't put my existing 2nd drive on the other Primise IDE channel--it is still a slave to my primary C: drive. Since then I've noticed that transferring to the old slave drive is slower than transferring to the new one that is on the Promise controller. Both my motherboard IDE controllers and my Promise controller are ATA/100.

Wayne Larmon
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
 
Relatively speaking, CD and DVD devices are pretty slow in the data transfer department. Hard disks may benefit from their own IDE channel (possibly - depends on what you are doing) but optical drives will not. For the most part, all you will be doing is increasing the cost and complexity of your system.

pschatz100
Wayne Larmon said:
For maximum speed, you should use a separate IDE channel for each
drive. So you are already losing speed by putting four drives on
two IDE channels. When I had your problem and I wanted to add a
third drive to my desktop machine, I added a Promise controller and
put the new drive on it. But I didn't put my existing 2nd drive on
the other Primise IDE channel--it is still a slave to my primary C:
drive. Since then I've noticed that transferring to the old slave
drive is slower than transferring to the new one that is on the
Promise controller. Both my motherboard IDE controllers and my
Promise controller are ATA/100.

Wayne Larmon
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
You have several options available to you. The most sensible one would normally be to do away with either your old CD-RW or the DVD reader, but if you don't want to do that, you might consider going for a firewire/USB DVD burner - they're not all that expensive. I'm not sure if you can get that capability on an internal drive though.

Another idea, although involving more expense, would be to replace one of your hard drives with a newer SATA drive which would require its own controller card - the new SATA interface allows for much faster data transfer.

Or you could go with your workmates' recommendation - there's nothing wrong with that.

BTW, you should really have the two hard drives on separate IDE channels - you can easily buy another Ultra IDE cable to replace the older one. Also, it is recommended that you split your optical drives, especially if you intend to do any disk to disk copies. (IDE channel 1 - Hard disk 1 (Master) and Optical drive 1 (Slave), IDE channel 2 - Hard disk 2 (Master) and Optical drive 2 (Slave)).
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
 
The idea is to convert the DVD reader to the Japan region and make DVD's that are worldwide compatible.

My wife is Japanese and I would like to be able to view Japanese market DVDs.

Brian
pschatz100 said:
Why do you need separate DVD reader, CD Burner, and DVD Burner?
The DVD burner will do all of that. Why not just get rid of your
old CD Burner? (assuming you want to have two DVD's.)

pschatz100
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I have one channel of Ultra IDE on the mother board with both of my hard drives on it.

The read/write times between the two wasn't too bad when I reconfiged (read transfered the pictures from one drive to the other, something like 20gb worth) the system last month.

Usually, I use one drive for picture storage and the main (C) drive for the system programs.

I'm not sure if any speed gains would be noticable as I usually transfer my pictures via firewire cardreader to the 'picture' drive directly which leaves the C drive idle.

Brian
pschatz100 said:
pschatz100
Wayne Larmon said:
For maximum speed, you should use a separate IDE channel for each
drive. So you are already losing speed by putting four drives on
two IDE channels. When I had your problem and I wanted to add a
third drive to my desktop machine, I added a Promise controller and
put the new drive on it. But I didn't put my existing 2nd drive on
the other Primise IDE channel--it is still a slave to my primary C:
drive. Since then I've noticed that transferring to the old slave
drive is slower than transferring to the new one that is on the
Promise controller. Both my motherboard IDE controllers and my
Promise controller are ATA/100.

Wayne Larmon
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
and see what you mean.

The slave has to wait on the master to finish it's job before the slave can get working. So, your suggestion to split the hard and optical drives would aleviate this bottle-neck issue.

Now I need to see if the second IDE slot on the motherboard is Ultra capable. I am not too excited to have one hard drive on the Ultra path and the other on the 'old school' IDE channel.

If I went the PCI card route versus the internal/external firewire burner, I could speed up all of the drives by switching to Ultra IDE or SATA for everyone. I wonder if the PCI bus is robust enough to handle all this information?

I would like to add a video capture card to the mix so I can move my Hi-8 videos of the kids to DVDs. I envision capturing the raw video, editing, then making a DVD of the finished product. So the system would be doing only one thing at a time which should keep the load off the PCI bus.

Looks like time to do more reasearch,

Brian
scotgotchi said:
You have several options available to you. The most sensible one
would normally be to do away with either your old CD-RW or the DVD
reader, but if you don't want to do that, you might consider going
for a firewire/USB DVD burner - they're not all that expensive. I'm
not sure if you can get that capability on an internal drive though.
Another idea, although involving more expense, would be to replace
one of your hard drives with a newer SATA drive which would require
its own controller card - the new SATA interface allows for much
faster data transfer.
Or you could go with your workmates' recommendation - there's
nothing wrong with that.
BTW, you should really have the two hard drives on separate IDE
channels - you can easily buy another Ultra IDE cable to replace
the older one. Also, it is recommended that you split your optical
drives, especially if you intend to do any disk to disk copies.
(IDE channel 1 - Hard disk 1 (Master) and Optical drive 1 (Slave),
IDE channel 2 - Hard disk 2 (Master) and Optical drive 2 (Slave)).
Click to expand...
 
Your motherboard sounds reasonable up-to-date. It should have USB 2.0 ports on it. If it does, adding the DVD burner as an external is the easiest high performance method. Usually I'm finding I run out of internal drive bays.

Reconfiguring your existing hard drives and opticals notwithstanding, adding an external USB 2.0 DVD is easy, doesn't require any more add-on cards (assuming existing USB 2.0 port), can offer high performance (theoretical 480Mbps or 48 MB/sec throughtput), and leaves your existing drives in place.

Regards,
Wayne
BSell said:
The slave has to wait on the master to finish it's job before the
slave can get working. So, your suggestion to split the hard and
optical drives would aleviate this bottle-neck issue.

Now I need to see if the second IDE slot on the motherboard is
Ultra capable. I am not too excited to have one hard drive on the
Ultra path and the other on the 'old school' IDE channel.

If I went the PCI card route versus the internal/external firewire
burner, I could speed up all of the drives by switching to Ultra
IDE or SATA for everyone. I wonder if the PCI bus is robust enough
to handle all this information?

I would like to add a video capture card to the mix so I can move
my Hi-8 videos of the kids to DVDs. I envision capturing the raw
video, editing, then making a DVD of the finished product. So the
system would be doing only one thing at a time which should keep
the load off the PCI bus.

Looks like time to do more reasearch,

Brian
scotgotchi said:
You have several options available to you. The most sensible one
would normally be to do away with either your old CD-RW or the DVD
reader, but if you don't want to do that, you might consider going
for a firewire/USB DVD burner - they're not all that expensive. I'm
not sure if you can get that capability on an internal drive though.
Another idea, although involving more expense, would be to replace
one of your hard drives with a newer SATA drive which would require
its own controller card - the new SATA interface allows for much
faster data transfer.
Or you could go with your workmates' recommendation - there's
nothing wrong with that.
BTW, you should really have the two hard drives on separate IDE
channels - you can easily buy another Ultra IDE cable to replace
the older one. Also, it is recommended that you split your optical
drives, especially if you intend to do any disk to disk copies.
(IDE channel 1 - Hard disk 1 (Master) and Optical drive 1 (Slave),
IDE channel 2 - Hard disk 2 (Master) and Optical drive 2 (Slave)).
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
The new DVD burner will burn CDs so I don"t see why you need the old CD burner. I dumped my CD burner long ago, actually put it in a older machine that had a slower CDR device.

Just get rid of the CD you don't need it. I do find having 2 DVD devices in my machine. But who needs an old CDR device?

Ed
BSell said:
My wife is Japanese and I would like to be able to view Japanese
market DVDs.

Brian
pschatz100 said:
Why do you need separate DVD reader, CD Burner, and DVD Burner?
The DVD burner will do all of that. Why not just get rid of your
old CD Burner? (assuming you want to have two DVD's.)

pschatz100
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Ed
http://www.cbrycelea.com/photos/
 
pschatz100 said:
Relatively speaking, CD and DVD devices are pretty slow in the data
transfer department. Hard disks may benefit from their own IDE
channel (possibly - depends on what you are doing) but optical
drives will not. For the most part, all you will be doing is
increasing the cost and complexity of your system.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I should have specified hard drives. What I was referring to was running two hard drives as master/slave on a single IDE channel. As compared to using a separate channel for each hard drive. i.e., master/slave == slower. So popping in a $30 IDE controller card so you can put each hard drive on a separate channel might make your hard disk to hard disk transfer speeds be faster then running them as master/slave.

Also, it used to be that you would drastically slow things down if you mixed slower drives (CD/DVD) with faster drives (hard drives) on the same IDE channel. Like having a hard disk as master and a CD drive as slave. I don't know if this is still true, but I try to avoid mixing fast and slow drives on the same channel.

Wayne Larmon
pschatz100 said:
Wayne Larmon said:
For maximum speed, you should use a separate IDE channel for each
drive. So you are already losing speed by putting four drives on
two IDE channels. When I had your problem and I wanted to add a
third drive to my desktop machine, I added a Promise controller and
put the new drive on it. But I didn't put my existing 2nd drive on
the other Primise IDE channel--it is still a slave to my primary C:
drive. Since then I've noticed that transferring to the old slave
drive is slower than transferring to the new one that is on the
Promise controller. Both my motherboard IDE controllers and my
Promise controller are ATA/100.

Wayne Larmon
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I have to check and see how fast the perspective DVD burner will do CD's.

I find I slow down my 48x burner to around 20x or so for more consistant burns.

Thanks for opening my eyes to another solution,

Brian
Ed Shropshire said:
Just get rid of the CD you don't need it. I do find having 2 DVD
devices in my machine. But who needs an old CDR device?

Ed
BSell said:
My wife is Japanese and I would like to be able to view Japanese
market DVDs.

Brian
pschatz100 said:
Why do you need separate DVD reader, CD Burner, and DVD Burner?
The DVD burner will do all of that. Why not just get rid of your
old CD Burner? (assuming you want to have two DVD's.)

pschatz100
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Ed
http://www.cbrycelea.com/photos/
Click to expand...
 
Once you start talking about using a USB or firwire burner it makes me think about underruns and stuff like that.

I take it the external drives have this handled?

Brian
wtm961 said:
Reconfiguring your existing hard drives and opticals
notwithstanding, adding an external USB 2.0 DVD is easy, doesn't
require any more add-on cards (assuming existing USB 2.0 port), can
offer high performance (theoretical 480Mbps or 48 MB/sec
throughtput), and leaves your existing drives in place.

Regards,
Wayne
BSell said:
The slave has to wait on the master to finish it's job before the
slave can get working. So, your suggestion to split the hard and
optical drives would aleviate this bottle-neck issue.

Now I need to see if the second IDE slot on the motherboard is
Ultra capable. I am not too excited to have one hard drive on the
Ultra path and the other on the 'old school' IDE channel.

If I went the PCI card route versus the internal/external firewire
burner, I could speed up all of the drives by switching to Ultra
IDE or SATA for everyone. I wonder if the PCI bus is robust enough
to handle all this information?

I would like to add a video capture card to the mix so I can move
my Hi-8 videos of the kids to DVDs. I envision capturing the raw
video, editing, then making a DVD of the finished product. So the
system would be doing only one thing at a time which should keep
the load off the PCI bus.

Looks like time to do more reasearch,

Brian
scotgotchi said:
You have several options available to you. The most sensible one
would normally be to do away with either your old CD-RW or the DVD
reader, but if you don't want to do that, you might consider going
for a firewire/USB DVD burner - they're not all that expensive. I'm
not sure if you can get that capability on an internal drive though.
Another idea, although involving more expense, would be to replace
one of your hard drives with a newer SATA drive which would require
its own controller card - the new SATA interface allows for much
faster data transfer.
Or you could go with your workmates' recommendation - there's
nothing wrong with that.
BTW, you should really have the two hard drives on separate IDE
channels - you can easily buy another Ultra IDE cable to replace
the older one. Also, it is recommended that you split your optical
drives, especially if you intend to do any disk to disk copies.
(IDE channel 1 - Hard disk 1 (Master) and Optical drive 1 (Slave),
IDE channel 2 - Hard disk 2 (Master) and Optical drive 2 (Slave)).
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
My new 8x NEC DVD Burner is rated at 32X for CDR. Not the fastest, but good enough for me. I only use CDRs any more for large files to others. So I rarely fill a full CD. I do all my archieving to DVD.

I pulled the faster CDR out of my machine to make room for my DVD burner. I have never missed it.

Ed
BSell said:
I find I slow down my 48x burner to around 20x or so for more
consistant burns.

Thanks for opening my eyes to another solution,

Brian
Ed Shropshire said:
Just get rid of the CD you don't need it. I do find having 2 DVD
devices in my machine. But who needs an old CDR device?

Ed
BSell said:
My wife is Japanese and I would like to be able to view Japanese
market DVDs.

Brian
pschatz100 said:
Why do you need separate DVD reader, CD Burner, and DVD Burner?
The DVD burner will do all of that. Why not just get rid of your
old CD Burner? (assuming you want to have two DVD's.)

pschatz100
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Ed
http://www.cbrycelea.com/photos/
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
Ed
http://www.cbrycelea.com/photos/
 
i'd just get rid of the cd drive and add the dvd drive as some others have suggested, and all your problems would be solved. You dont need 2 optical drives. For copies of a cd its better to make an image then burn the image to prevent burn errors.

An usb2 case for a hdd is extremely handy and flexible especially if you transfer files between pcs often. Also the hdd doesnt have to be switched on unless you need it. They come in usb2 or firewire or both which costs a bit more.This is just an option to be aware of but its probably better to have your data hdd as an an internal ide hdd as their extra speed would be advantageous for video editing/dvd burning etc.
Wayne Larmon said:
adanac said:
- -
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I didn't see that I was responding to a post suggesting an external DVD drive. I was thinking about an external hard drive, that is about 40%-50% slower than an internal IDE drive. I have no knowledge about the speed of external DVD drives. (And would like to know, because I'm ripe for getting a DVD burner.)

Wayne Larmon
 
I decided to take Ed's advice and dump the CD burner to make room for the DVD burner.

I also have a video capture card with software (Pinnacle Studio 9) coming.

Thanks to all who responded,

Brian
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
 
Hi Bsell, I had the same problem and went this way.
Maxtor Atlas 36.7GB HDD scsi (OS & Apps)
Maxtor 300GB HDD primary master (storage)
DVD/CD Reader primary slave
Pioneer 106 DVDR secondary master
Plextor 48/24 CDR secondary slave

Will burn CDR 3mins and DVDR 17mins simultaneous. 2.2GHz Athlon, 512 DDRam, Win XP Pro.
Col.
BSell said:
BSell said:
Found out I have maxed out my motherboard's IDE capability. (two
hard drives/DVD reader and a seperater CD burner) So I need
something so I can add a DVD burner. The case has the room for the
new addition. The hold up is the lack of cable hook-up for the
IDE/ATA device on the motherboard.

Guys I work with recommend a PCI/ATA card to expand my drive
capability.

Any ideas/suggestions before I send off for a card and cables?

I am running XP on a 2.4ghz Gateway with 512 DDR SDRAM.

The Ultra IDE cable has my two 7,200 rpm hard drives on it. The
'old school' IDE has the DVD reader and the CD burner on it.

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
--
...our world is but a hot pixel on the immeasurable CCD that is the universe.
 
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