An Promise IDE ATA 133 Card to hard drive question ?

[dvdman3]

An Promise TX2 IDE card has 2 ports which allows 2 devices each on each IDE. The first port your drive has to be set primary but on the 2nd IDE Port [3rd and 4th devices] does your drive or CD ROm or DVD does it have to be Primary as well or secondary ? What about the 4th drive if you have.. also secondary ? Sorry if it sounds confusing.

 

[Mday]

"primary" and "secondary" refer to the channels themselves, that is, the connector if you dont know what a channel is. "master" and "slave" refer to drives on a channel. you dont set your drives to "primary" or "secondary" but you do set your drives to "master" and "slave". this also corresponds to the motherboard channels. what connector of the controller you plug your drive into dictates whether or not the drive is in the primary or secondary channel.

so, if you have 4 drives on the card, you would have the following:
primary master (a drive connected to the primary channel, with jumpers set to master)
primary slave (a drive connected to the primary channel, with jumpers set to slave)
secondary master (a drive connected to the secondary channel, with jumpers set to master)
secondary slave (a drive connected to the secondary channel, with jumpers set to slave)

you can have your drives in any order you want, but the standard is to have the HDD on primary, and CD\DVD drives on secondary. if you're using your promise card and the motherboard's controller, i recommend putting the optical drives on the motherboard.

 

[dvdman3]

Thanks... yes what I meant was:

The PCI card itself have 2 ports [one is primary and the other is secondary] right ? I ever heard that someone said the 1st port is primary and the 2nd IDE Port one as well. Note that this is referring to the PCI card and not the Motherboard as that I know on the configuration but only the ATA 133 card is what I am unsure of.