ATA100 PCI controller card for additional master channel.**EDIT** Bought one...any do's/do not's?

[MichaelD]

**EDIT HERE**
I just purchased a Promise ATA100TX2. Should have it by Friday. Should I hook my CDRW to it, or my backup HD? Should I hook both the CDR and the CDRW to it? Thanks much.







I've been thinking about purchasing a ATA100 PCI card to put either my backup HD or my CDRW on. What prompted this consideration is that ever since I put my CDRW and my backup HD on the same IDE channel, I've been burning coasters, getting BSODs, hardlocks and other crap that never, ever happened before I made the switch.

I have a 2-drive raid array on the mobo's built-in Raid controller. My DVD rom is master on primary IDE. My CDRW is master and backup HD is slave on secondary IDE.

I was thinking about getting a PCI card and putting one of the drives on there in hopes of rectifying this problems. How much does a good card run? Is the PCI bus transfer rate slower the mobo's? (I hope I worded that correctly!)

I also considered a hardware raid card in order to free up the raid channels on the board...but at $300, I think I'll try the PCI card solution first! Thanks.

 

[Bozo Galora]

good idea for your problem.
promise ATA100 TX-2 $49.00

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks Bozo; appreciate the vote of confidence. Anyone else? NelsonMuntz, you out there? Noriaki? Helloooooo?

 

[MichaelD]

TTT

 

[Paulson]

I just bought one and have it at home...

It's confusing, but then again I'm probably stupid...

 

[gopunk]

hey paulson, how's it confusing? i'm looking to buy one soon, so it'd be nice to hear what types of problems people have. thanks

 

[MichaelD]

Paulson,

Huh? Now you've got me confused! RU using it yet? What devices do you have on it. Does it conflict w/anything? I'd imagine not, but you never know. Info! Info! Info!

 

[kelesh3]

would one of these help me burn on the fly from 50xcdrom to 32xcdrw? i get buffer underruns..

 

[MichaelD]

^^^

 

[Paulson]

I have a wd 40 gig hard drive on it and it's not recognizing it at the moment... I don't get it...

It tries to, and then comes up

UltraATA 100 Bios not installed because device couldn't find any drives (or something to that effect )

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it recognizes the card, just not the drive on it

 

[bacillus]

Paulson, check your connections again. if you already have an OS on the wd 40 gig hard drive & it's going to be your boot hdd then install the drivers for it while your hdd is connected to the m/board ide connector then move it over to the controller card. you'll neeed to choose to boot from scsi first or second( after floppy)in bios. this is because the controller card is seen as a scsi device by the system!

 

[bacillus]

Paulson, don't know if this could assist you as well.

from the promise site

What does it mean when I boot the system and the Ultra100 says, "BIOS Not Installed"?
Cause: No Hard Drives attached to Ultra100.
Solution: The Ultra100 is fully PnP. This means all the resources that it uses are GIVEN to it by the PnP BIOS on the motherboard. The Ultra100 does support IRQ sharing, but this will not work unless ALL the concerned devices support IRQ sharing. If your motherboard allows you to control the assignment of these resources, you may be able to remedy the problem by "playing around" with them. You can also try resetting the configuration data in the CMOS. This is usually an option in the PnP section of the CMOS. The only available settings for this option will be "Enabled" and "Disabled". Set it to "Enabled", save and exit, and reboot. Otherwise, the only way you might be able to affect these assignments is to switch the PCI slot that the card is in.

 

[MichaelD]

Bacillus,
You don't have PM enabled, just FYI.

I'm prolly (prolly, not definite yet) going to put my backup HD on the Promise controller. You're comment that "it's seen as a SCSI device" caused me grief because the onboard RAID controller on my mobo is also seen as a SCSI device in device mangler. I will not be booting from this HD. It doesn't have an OS on it. Just 3 partitions and massive amounts of files.

Is there any particular order I should follow when installing this thing? I.E. Install the card/drivers with nothing hooked up to it. Make sure its OK. HOok up the HD and reboot? Thanks buddy.

 

[Muse]

The Promise Ultra100 TX2 is a highly rated card. I intend to install mine tonight. You're supposed to get higher transfer rates with ATA100 drives on it than on your MB's IDE controller, so you're best off having your HDD's on it. Put your boot/most used drive on Promise's IDE 1 Master. If you have another frequently used HDD, put it on Promise's IDE 2 Master. Put your IDE peripherals like CDR, CDRW, DVD, ZIP etc. on your MB's IDE controller.

Dan

 

[Paulson]

I don't have an operating system installed on the hard drive...

I'm just trying to get it to connect...

I'll have to move the pci slots (there's only 3 on this old beast)

 

[Paulson]

dp :|

 

[bacillus]

<< Is there any particular order I should follow when installing this thing? I.E. Install the card/drivers with nothing hooked up to it. Make sure its OK. HOok up the HD and reboot? >>


sounds good to me. I've found that the promise cards handles irq sharing well though having the card alone on 1 irq would be ideal.
don't worry about putting your backup hdd on it provided it's not bootable. if it is bootable, you may find that the system may want to boot off of it instead of your raid setup. the order of scsi detection depends on which slot the card is in. if I remember correctly, the card furthest away from the agp slot is detected first. most likely your raid is linked to slot 2 but I 'm not familiar with your m/board!

 

[MichaelD]

Thank you. Wanna laugh? Which slot am I prolly gonna put the Promise card in? The last slot. I'm not kidding! Right now, none of my cards share an IRQ. I like it that way. I have my dialup modem (which is not in use) in PCI slot 6. That's where I was gonna put it! We'll see, I guess. Later.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

Hey Michael! Sorry I didn't get in here to talk to you sooner. I think you are on the right track. Since you don't need to boot from the IDE controller, you don't need to change the boot order. It might already be going to SCSI to get to the onboard RAID controller, but I don't know. I would echo the thoughts of others on here and just put your extra hard drive on there and leave the DVD and CDRW as master on the two mobo IDE channels. I would also suggest that you approach it the way you mentioned earlier. Put the card in first and set it up and then put the hard drive on there and get it connected. If I remember right I had an issue getting a hard drive recognized once because it had EZ-BIOS (it was a small, old hard drive) on it. Once I removed the EZ-BIOS, it was recognized just fine.

 

[Paulson]

w00t!

figured it out!

you have to take the jumper off of western digital hard drives to get it to work!

thank you

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks, NelsonMuntz/Bacillus/Paulson! I appreciate the help. I can't wait to get back to &quot;NoCoasterVille&quot; It was a sweet place to be. I used to read the &quot;I'm getting coasters, help!&quot; posts and just think &quot;coasters? What are they?&quot;

Eh, now I know. It's gotten pretty bad, actually. BSODs and hardlocks stink. Ugh. I can't wait! Have a great evening.

 

[MichaelD]

DP, sorry. Proxy server here farts around a lot.