Any limit to number of PCI IDE controllers?

[sMashPiranha]

Hi

I'm running one IDE controller already but I'm getting a DVD drive tomorrow and then I'm looking at getting an 80GB Barracuda in the near future. I want to keep all my drives that I already have in there (can never have too much storage). I like to keep each of my drives on seperate channels for the speed (I'd go SCSI but thats not so easy in my part of the world and on my budget 🙁). Can I slap in another IDE controller and have everything work okay?

 

[AndyHui]

The only thing limiting you would be free IRQs, unless you are running Win2K or WinXP in ACPI mode (255 virtual IRQs).

 

[sMashPiranha]

Cool, thanks Andy. I'm running 98SE and have IRQ's 4 and 6 free, should I still be okay?

 

[Lord Evermore]

More than likely you're going to end up sharing IRQ's no matter what you do. Often motherboards hard-assign IRQ's to certain slots, or onboard stuff uses certain IRQ's that you can't change and ends up sharing with slots. 98SE isn't bad about sharing though.

Hope you don't actually want throughput to more than a couple of those drives at once though. The PCI bus only has 133MBps of bandwidth peak. That can be peaked out by only two drives at ATA66 bursting or 2 or 3 running at once in normal use, and that's before you consider bandwidth for things like sound and network card. Even SCSI wouldn't be able to help TOO much there, since 80MBps is the max for a 32bit controller I think (don't know if Ultra160 is available in 32bit 33MHz), and the better hardware control can't make throughput that much better.