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How many devices can ONE IDE controller handel?

C

Catchen22

Member
Exactly what it says. How many devices can one IDE controller handel? I have 3 CD-ROMS ( burner, dvd, regular 56x ) and I wanted to put them all on ONE IDE controller because I only have two on my motherboard and the other one is for the hard drive ( the 56x is currently on that one also ). I went into the store and asked the guy for a 3 device 40 pin ribbon and he told me that I CAN'T do it so he sold me a PCI IDE adapter. Can an IDE handel more than two devices? Should I keep the PCI IDE adapter and use it anyways so that everything can have it's own ribbon?
 
Each IDE cable can have three connectors, one for the mobo and two for devices.. each channel/mobo header will handle two devices (HDs or CDRoms or whatever combo). Most IDE controller cards will have two or perhaps even 4 connectors on them... so that one controller could allow you to connect 4 devices if it has two IDE cable headers/channels on it.

sorry to all hardware people about the lingo, but I think it's close enough to be understandable.
 
If you are wondering if to keep the controller, make sure it supports cd-roms and such. It might not, considering the one that I have does not.
 
So let me ask a some what similar question. Suppose I have 2 Cd-roms on one IDE controller, if I put each cd-rom on it's own IDE controller would the cd-roms get better perfomance. Since they don't have to share the IDE controller with any other device, I would think it would get better performance but i'm not sure if i'm right or not.
 


<< So let me ask a some what similar question. Suppose I have 2 Cd-roms on one IDE controller, if I put each cd-rom on it's own IDE controller would the cd-roms get better perfomance. Since they don't have to share the IDE controller with any other device, I would think it would get better performance but i'm not sure if i'm right or not. >>



not really. They are CD-ROMs.

On any IDE channel (a channel is pretty much one set of connectors, 40 pins at the controller end) only one drive can be accessed at any given time. The only thing that this hurts is if you have 2 HDDs on one channel and move\copy files between those 2 drives. This setup is slower than if both HDDs were on separate channels.

However, since you have 2 CD-ROMs, you'd hardly be transferring data between those 2 drives ;-)

Speaking of channels, on your motherboard, a channel is equivalent to a controller. However, on an addon pci IDE card, that ONE controller actually has 2 channels. Any IDE channel can support up to 2 drives only.
 
On the primary controller I would make your HDD the master and the 56X the slave. On the secondary controller I would make your burner the master and your DVD the slave. Also check to see if any of them support direct memory access (DMA). This will also improve performance.
 


<< However, since you have 2 CD-ROMs, you'd hardly be transferring data between those 2 drives ;-) >>


But that STILL doesn't mean that you couldn't be copying information from BOTH CD drives (if they were on the same channel) TO a hard drive on another channel. Since I have a SCSI hard drive now, I have both my DVD and CD-RW drive as Primary on their own seperate IDE channels.
 
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