5 Devices. What to Do???

[Grisham21]

Currently on my comp i have a dvd-rom, a burner, and a 60gig ibm drive. I was hoping to add a 80gb WD Special Edition and a 120GB Special Edition. The 80GB would be the primary, the 60gb would be sort of a temp drive since its been acting sorta strange lately and the 120GB would be storage. I dont have onbaord RAID so i was wondering what type of controller you guys reccommend and the configuration u guys would choose.

Thanks a lot.

 

[agnitrate]

I would get an Promise ATA100 controller or something along those lines seeing as how ATA133 isn't really even useful for most HDs. I'm sure you could probably pick one up from the FS/FT forum.

Have you bought these drives already or do you need the space right away? Serial ATA is just around the corner, it might be worth waiting to buy a controller card for that But it's not really that much of a deal.

Hunt around in the FS/FT forum, I'm sure you'll find something.

-silver

 

[Grisham21]

I havent bought the drives yet but serial ATA seems to be a while off before they have the size i need. What type of configuration would u recommend for the devices?

 

[agnitrate]

Currently on my comp i have a dvd-rom, a burner, and a 60gig ibm drive. I was hoping to add a 80gb WD Special Edition and a 120GB Special Edition. The 80GB would be the primary, the 60gb would be sort of a temp drive since its been acting sorta strange lately and the 120GB would be storage. I dont have onbaord RAID so i was wondering what type of controller you guys reccommend and the configuration u guys would choose.

I am by no means an expert in the setup of drives so I am hoping that an expert will come in here and correct me if I am wrong

If you get the card, put each HD on a separate channel. That way you won't have too much of a bottleneck. I would probably arrange it like this:

Primary IDE: Master: Main HD
Slave : DVD-ROM

Secondary IDE: Master: Other HD
Slave: CD-R

ATA Card: Primary : Yet another HD

I am pretty sure you're supposed to keep your CD-R and HD that you're transferring from off of the same channel to prevent bandwidth crunching so I wouldn't plan on burning CDs from the HD that is on the same channel as your CD-R. Maybe somebody else can verify this and hopefully correct any mistakes I have made

-silver

 

[Grisham21]

Thanks a lot. Thats what i was thinking.