IDE Controller Card Question

[Mendes]

Here is my situation. I have 3 CD Burners (40x, 48x, 52x) and a Burner/DVD Combo Drive. Also a Fujitsu 4.6 Gig (Strictly for OS loading) and my WD 120Gig. 2 of my burners used to be in another computer and now i am moving them into one as my other computer has been sold. How will the IDE Controller work? Are the drives on recognized after windows loads? If the motherboard can only load 4 (primary master, prim slave, sec mast, sec slave) devices how will the other ones be loaded or work? I have no experience with these controller cards. Any feedback will help. Recommendations/what to do etc etc etc. Thanks in advance!

Mendes

 

[Zepper]

. Each channel of an IDE controller can handle only two (2) drives. So on a standard mobo, you can have four IDE drives.
. Is there a good reason for having more than two burners installed? In any case, only one drive per channel can operate simultaneously.
. You want the drive you record to most often on another channel from the source it most often receives its data from. You always want your data source to be on another channel from the recording device, else much slower.
. As much as possible I like to have each IDE drive on its own channel. Silicon Image based IDE/RAID controllers cost about $20. Those will run just about any type of IDE drive, while the Promise and HighPoint generally work only with hard drives.
. Without buying a controller, i would set up as follows:
4G -Primary master; Fastest burner - Primary Slave; 120G - Secondary Master; Burner/DVD Combo - Secondary Slave. All drives need to be capable of ATA/UDMA operation for optimum performance.
.bh.
:sun: