5 devices, two IDE's .....

agathodaimon · February 5th, 2003, 09:00 PM

Okay, my dad is trying to get me to build him a computer, and he's dead set on having a CD-RW Drive, a CD Drive a DVD drive, a Zip Drive, a Hard drive (obvious) and a floppy.

We've pretty much decided on the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Mobo, but
how in the world is it possible to hook up a HD, CDRW, CD, DVD and a Zip drive together with only two IDE's?

I REALLY don't want anything to be on the same channel as the HD, so that only leaves me with two available channels and four components left over...

Is there a solution to this?

zidane182 · February 5th, 2003, 09:07 PM

a7n8x comes with serial ata.. use it =)
also, you can get a firewire or usb 2.0 zip drive. a7n8x has firewire and usb of course

zidane182 · February 5th, 2003, 09:09 PM

you could also get a pci ide controller pretty cheap

J-Excel · February 5th, 2003, 09:16 PM

I just picked up an Promise Ultra133 pci ide controller for about $50.

agathodaimon · February 5th, 2003, 09:19 PM

ok, cool.
I knew there were PCI devices, but I wasn't sure what they were called.
I'll mention to him the external zip drive. That sounds like a better thing to do IMO.

Serial ATA? I've never heard of it.... How exactly does it work?

Hell, if he's paying $145.00 for the MOBO, he may as well be using it's features!

zidane182 · February 5th, 2003, 09:36 PM

serial ata uses serial wire instead of parallel ide cables. i think its supposed to be faster. it seems like it would be slower because its serial,but i guess not. you have to spend more money to get a serial hdd, but prices will drop eventually. the a7n8x RAID serial ATA =P I would use it but i don't really have the money to buy serial hdds =)

daveleau · February 5th, 2003, 10:44 PM

If you go the route of serial ATA, you would have to buy converters since the drives do not have compatible connections. This one is $40 for one device. That would mean a steep price for a very limited use component.

I would suggest a PCI IDE controller. Newegg.com has the cards running from $20 up.

Dave

Nighthawk · February 5th, 2003, 11:04 PM

If you buy a KT400 board, the Promise SerialATA controller that many of them have has 2 Serial ATA ports and one ATA100/133 (don't quite remember) port. I'd get that one and put the hard drives on the Promise controller.

agathodaimon · February 6th, 2003, 12:23 AM

I was kinda thinking about that Nighthawk...
But he WANTS an nforce2 board... *sigh*

Atomic Rooster · February 6th, 2003, 12:39 AM

agathodaimon -
The ASUS A7N8X Deluxe has two IDE ports supporting ATA33/66/100/133 AND two Serial ATA ports. You can get the serial adaptor and connect the HDD to the Serial ATA port. That leaves the two IDE ports free for the CD-RW, CDR, DVD, and Zip Drive.
My new Abit NF7-S motherboard has the same layout and I have the HDD connected to the Serial ATA port (with an adaptor) and my CDRW on IDE1.