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how many IDE devices can I hook up to my system? How to configure all this???

E

Ender510

Golden Member
I assume I can do 4 IDE devices to the motherboard (Asus). i also have a promise ata/100 controller card. Does that mean I can do 4 more to the ata/100 controller card, but I should only do ata/66 or ata/100 recommended because if I do ata/33 devices, then it will slow all the other devices down? So does that mean, I can really do 4 ata/66-ata/100 on the promise and the 4 devices on the mb?

How about if I recently got the maxtor deal, and also the maxtor ata/100 card? Assuming I have an open PCI slot and physical space for the additional HD's to sit, is it possible to also have anotehr set of 4 ata66-ata100 hard drives?

Please let me know if my assumptions are correct or incorrect based on what I have said so far..

Also, if I DO have so mayn HD's assuming it's possible.. is there a prog out there that will combine drives, so 2 drives will appear as one letter? Thanks in advance everyone..
 
Urm - in essence, yes.

Prog that will make 2 drives appear as one:
That would be either IDE-RAID (depends on the controller) or, respectively, your OS has to support SOFTWARE-based RAID. W2K and NT can do that for you.

In general, this could work - watch out for your power though. If you have that many bug HDD's check your power-budget - the drives might be leeching too much power from your PSU for the system to run stable.

Physically & logically, this should work, as far as I can see it. You might have problems if you want to use one particular IDE-controller (not the on-board one) as boot-device, in that case you might have to watch for your IDE-slots.
EDIT: Obviously I didn't meant IDE-slots - I meant *PCI* 🙂

Hmmm ... other than power & your boot-priorities, can't think of much to watch out for at the moment....

Hope this helps 🙂
 
including your promise card you can use a total of 8 ide devices.



<< Does that mean I can do 4 more to the ata/100 controller card, but I should only do ata/66 or ata/100 recommended because if I do ata/33 devices, then it will slow all the other devices down? >>


false! below is cut &amp; pasted from the promise ata 100pci infomation:
Devices of different standards can be connected to the Ultra-100 without performance degredation, due to the independent programmable timing registers in the controller's design.
Basically,that means that having an ata 100 hdd on the same channel with a hardware device of different rating will not degrade the hdd's performance.
 
bacillus: I am unclear about the number of devices. Are you saying including the Promise and standard mb IDE devices, I can have 8 because it's 4+4? What if I hook up the Maxtor ATA/100 Card as well - does that mean I will now be able to use 12 IDE devices?

As far as power goes, will my power really be drained a huge amount? And RAID, isn't it better to have the same exact drives to have a RAID setup?

Here is what I have now:

Asus MB with ATA/33 4 IDE Capable
30 GIG Quantum ata/66 drive
6 GIG Western Digital
Plextor 12x IDE CDRW
Plextor 40x CD Rom
Toshiba 40x CD Rom

..and a 6 GIG Maxtor not doing anything. I recently ordered the Maxtor 30 GIG drive and plan on buying another Maxtor 30 or 60. So I will have 2 more hard drives to put in my computer.

So at that point, I will have a total of 3 capable ata/66-ata/100 hard drives. Should I use the Maxtor Controller card or the Promise? Once I do that, should I just hook up all the cd rom drives and CDRs to the mb's IDE? Or will I have boot problems?

Thanks in advance..


 
i thought only advanced server had the raid?

and i think you will have 12 ide if you add the card. anyhoo, people keep saying raid 0 aint worth the risk/trouble/performance hit/jump?
 
Yeah, 4 per. 4 on the MoBo, 4 on the Promise, and 4 on the Maxtor.

Current IDE controllers shouldn't get a big hit from mixing drive speeds.

RAID 0 will increase performance, but also increases risk cause either HDD failing will lose all your data.

You can solder a resistor on the Promise to make it FastTrak (RAID), from what I understand. It can do 1+0 (striping + mirroring) so you can get speed increase with redundancy. You'll need 4 drives though. Similar sized drives should be used (but is not a necessity), but you will lose capacity if you try and mix sizes.
 
Both NT server versions included raid too. Will the Maxtor require that it take over for the BIOS in detecting hard drives like most add in IDE cards do? Seems to cause a problem with even having a bootable SCSI card in a system with an IDE card plus the onboard IDE.
I would suggest if you are goign with that many drives, you should be considering SCSI in general and a second power supply to suppplement the first one.
That is a lot of IRQs being taken up for IDE.
 
Not talking about RAID, but when I tried to have a Promise card and my on board HighPoint sh!t my system didn't like it a-bit. 🙂

So now I'm down to 8 devices, 5 HD and three cds. So 8 HDs should be plenty ok, given that you have a good power supply.
 
all version of NT/2000 support Software RAID. The difference is what version of RAID they support.

Making all drives appear as one... beyond raid , NT/2000 has the capability to make additional drives/partitions appear as folders. So you would have just C: and C:\program files\GAMES\ be another drive. The GAMES folder would actually be another drive. So you could have
C:\program files\GAMES\
C:\program files\PORN\
C:\program files\MP3s\
and each could be a seperate drive.

straight outa da win2000 Help:


<< To mount a volume at an NTFS folder

Open Disk Management.
In the details pane, right-click an NTFS volume, and then click Change Drive Letter and Path.
In the Change Drive Letter and Paths for dialog box, select the drive you want to mount at an NTFS folder, and then click Add.
In the Add New Drive Letter or Path dialog box, select Mount in this NTFS folder, and then specify the NTFS folder where you want to mount the volume.
Notes

You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure.
To open Disk Management, click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management. In the console tree under Storage, click Disk Management.
 >>

 
Sounds good.. thanks for the replies. I just need to figure out the optimal way in setting up what I have. Here is my system:

Asus Onboard ATA/33 IDE Controller (4 device capacity)
Promise ATA/100 IDE Controller (4 device cap)
Maxtor ATA/100 IDE Controller (4 device cap)

(2) Maxtor 30 GIG ATA/100 7200 RPM
Quantum 7200 RPM ATA/66 30 GIG
6 GIG Maxtor ATA/33 IDE
6 GIG Western Digital ATA/33 IDE (may not hook up and put in other computer)

Plextor 12x IDE CDRW
Plextor 40x CD ROM IDE
Toshiba 40x CD ROM IDE

Now, which ones should I set up master/slave and how to set up the boot order? As for OS, I plan on running either Win2K or WinME. What do you guys think?

I also have a SCSI 2 GIG Dat Drive I want to hookup but no software that will read it. Anyone know if something will read my Python??

Oh, this is all on a PII/300 overclocked to a 466 mhz now. I also have 192 mb RAM now, and will be adding another 128. Thanks in advance everyone..


 


<< Why use the two cdroms? >>



Well, I use the Plextor 40x for the DAE and also doing CD to CD burns. As for the Toshiba, I use that to read cds while I am doing CD to CD.. =)

bump - can anyone help??
 
What kind of power supply? You'll need atleast 350 watts. I reccomend the ERNMAX 350. Verry nice pow sup. Oh and get rid of one of those cdroms (whats up with that?).
 
Not sure if 350W will be enough ... there's a lot of HDD's ... but then, I'm used to thinking in terms of &quot;10K Ultra-160&quot; SCSI for servers ... so a 350W might be enough. I'd still go for power-budgetting &amp; make the calculations - just to be on the safe side. Alternatively, if you're lazy, go for 400W -ish PSU ... that *should* hold up 🙂.

Hmmm ... me want that many HDD's too 🙂.
 
How will I know if I have enough power? If I don't have enough, will anything be bad or will the computer just shut off? I have a full tower case right now - but not sure how much power I have running to it..
 
I've found in the past that with too little power, I get general flackiness in the system. Random errors that seem to occur more often when something is going on. Realize that if you go for the cd to cd burning will accessing a cd, you are easily using at least 4 drives simultaneous (3 of which are laser power hogs) and if you have your swap file on another drive, 5 drives. Since you have a full tower, I would opt for a second power supply slaved to the first. But that is my personal choice.
You could simply add one extra drive at a time and see how things go.
In looking at your drive list, do you really need those two 6 gig drives? Or would one suffice for ghost images for backups. Maybe consider using an removeable drive cage so you can swap drives out. Or drive cages if you want to play with multiple OSes and keep one data drive. Just coming up with some fairly cheap alternatives.
For the question on location of drives, put the cds on your motherboard controllers. Put your main source drive on a separate channel than the burner. Add in cards do not always like cdroms on them. Seems like a 50:50 shot. Reaslize that any access to your third drive will interfer somewhat with your direct burning. Do you have burnproof or are you counting on a large buffer to prevent buffer underruns? IF you have burnproof, it might be quicker in the long run to just let the system do its thing for the 5 minutes or so for the burn to avoid the laser realignment and restart period that occurs when burnproof goes into effect.
 
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