How do I set up 5 devices on 2 IDE channels?

[Yerdy]

I will have a CD-ROM drive, CD-RW, Zip, floppy and HD. Floppy gets it's own channel, HD gets it's own channel. Which leaves 3 "slow" devices for the last IDE channel. If I get the KT7 RAID, do I use one of the RAID channels for the HD and put the other stuff on the primary and secondary IDE channels, or do I get any mainboard I want and add a card for more channels?

Thanks

 

[Vipero]

Get a promise ata66 controller card for $25 which gives you 4 more IDE ports. I have one and it works perfectly with no bootup delay. Best to have the HD on it's own IDE port.

If you get raid card I believe you will have 8 IDE ports.

 

[DaddyG]

No card required. Put the CD-ROM on the same channel as the Hard-drive. Put the ZIP and the Burner together. This way, when you back up to ZIP, HDD will be on different channels. If you do a direct burn, you'll have different channels AND if you stage to the HDD first, you will still burn on different channels.

 

[Noriaki]

K first off flppy isn't IDE...

Make:

Primary master: hard drive
Primary slave: Zip Drive
Secondary master: CDRW
Secondary slave: CDROM

the "slower" zip drive won't hurt your hard drive's performance, some time ago I read a review about that. Unless it's in use the IDE bus will ignore the zip drive, it won't slow the whole channel down.

The only problem with this config is that going CDROM to CDRW copy on the fly isn't a good idea.

Image to your hard drive first, then copy to the CDRW.

My guess is that your CDRW and Zip drive are the lesat used devices, and nomrally you want only one of the two to see heavy use, so separate your hard drive and your CDRom (assumedly the two most used) and your performance should be fine, just having a Zip drive attached to your hard dirve won't hurt it, it will slow it down a bit while the Zip drive is in use, but the hard drive will still work in ATA66 or whatever the drive is.

If you happen to want more than 4 IDE devices get the Promise PCI card.
THat's what I"m doing.

 

[jsbush]

If you get the KT7-RAID then yes put your hard drive on the RAID channel and the rest on the other chanels. It doesn't matter if your hard drive is on raid, even if your not using it for raid.


Edit: HAHAHA all three of use posted at the same time, that's a first.

 

[Yerdy]

Thanks for your help guys!