clarification about IDE ports

[nclark42]

hi--

I am building a new system which I plan to have 6 IDE devices on it. When a board has 4 IDE ports (like the SINXP1394), it will support up to 8 IDE devices, right?

-Neal

 

[mechBgon]

Yes, but you will want to use the southbridge's native IDE ports for the optical devices, because the add-on IDE controllers generally don't like optical drives like CD and DVD drives very well.

 

[nclark42]

excellent. thank you kind sir.

does "southbridge" refer to a part of the motherboard?

 

[mechBgon]

Yes sir, the typical motherboard uses a "northbridge" which connects the CPU, memory, AGP bus and southbridge to eachother, and the southbridge handles the I/O stuff like the PCI bus, the IDE controllers, USB controllers, FireWire, floppy controller, COM and parallel ports, and often built-in network and audio too. In this photo, the two IDE ports that are down low are connected to an add-on IDE controller, so you would want to use those only for hard drives. The ones up higher are the ones hosted by the southbridge itself. The southbridge is the chip below the memory slots which has a gold-tone heatsink on it.

 

[nclark42]

Awesome! Thank you very much, you're very informative. I will def. connect the devices as you suggest when I get this board.

-Neal