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IDE controller cards

L

Link19

Senior member
I was looking to buy an IDE controller card so I could hook up extra drives. RAID is not at all imporatnt to me. I just want the extra IDE ports. I saw a SIIG Ultra ATA/133 PCI controller card at CompUSA. Is this a good brand to buy? Someone once told me that you wanted to get either Promise, Adaptec, Realtek, or Cross Point when buying an IDE controller card. The guy at CompUSA said that all of the IDE controller cards have a Realtek or Promise chip on them, but are built by different manufacturers. I saw an Adaptec one, but it had RAID and was $50 dollars more expensive. I also saw a Maxtor and a CompUSA one. I am looking for a reliable one that doesn't have RAID? Help greatly appreciated.
 
The most important thing also is that the drives and system perform just as fast and well on this controller card as they would on the regular IDE ports on your motherboard. It is also important that having a card like this will not slow your system down at all (although a slower boot up is ok, but not a slow down on anything else).
 
Are you looking just for the card, or a card and a drive? Just wondering, because I believe there are a number of HDD deals floating around that include a free IDE controler. I know for a fact that CompUSA has one now: A 160GB drive with a free card for $170 + tax out the door, and then a $70 MIR. The card included in this is a Promise Ultra ATA-133. I got in on one of these deals about a year ago (free card w/ Maxtor 80GB HDD) and it seemed to work just as well as the native controllers on my Epox 8KTA3 & ECS K7S5A boards. I don't use it any more because my new MB (bought it after the ECS died) has RAID built in, which I'm using as just a second IDE controller.

Nate
 
I have the SIIG ATA 133 Raid card and it works for me. Just plopped it in and winxp detected it and it runs smoothly. Haven't had a problem yet. (knock on wood) It even supports ATAPI drives which is a big plus if you don't wanna run the optical drives on the primary/secondary ide slots. I was able to pick it up at compgeeks for 19$ (before shipping and taxes).
 
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