Multiple Hard Drives Problem

[hrprofessional]

Ok guys - I thought I was all cool for having 11 hard drives. But....I have wrestled with this thing and have even had a tech come over and he is about as smart/stupid as me in the end result (isnt that sad that you can't even rely of computer repair people because you have attained just about as much knowledge?)

So I turn to you all.

I have a Soyo Ultra Dragon 333 Raid MB that can support 8 IDE devices on board if I dont use ATAPI devices - but since I do use a CD Burner and a DVD burner - it will only handle 6 IDE devices.

This is my problem - I have IDE cards (3 total) and I have arrayed the HD's as Master/Slaves. But the most I can get my computer to see in BIOS or Windows is 6 hard drives - it doesnt even see anything hooked to the IDE devices - though it sees the cards themselves.

When I try a different arrangement - I can get them to see the Primary Master of each card but not the slaves - for again a total of 6 IDE devices. No more, no less.

So I am about to kill my puter - and go crazy and perhaps just snap. Any ideas - am I crazy - am I dumb - what am I missing - in the BIOS I have tried enabling or disabling RAID function - no luck. Is there a known issue with this motherboard? Is it impossible to put on more than 8 devices even with IDE cards?

Sob! Help!

 

[Zepper]

If you really want LOTS of hard drives (and other stuff) you should really go SCSI (not quite as expensive as it used to be). Serial ATA is supposed to bring this feature to IDE, but it's still a ways down the road for most folks.
. I think most of the latest BIOSes can only deal with 8 IDE devices. If you really need more, you will have to get IDE cards with their own BIOSes on them to deal with their drives - but this is likely to result in Upper Memory and/or IRQ conflicts. Good luck...
.bh.

 

[Fireman]

I watched a show on The ScreenSavers. They did a feature called Build a Terabyte System. Not sure if any of the info can help you out but they took seven 160 gig HDDs and a couple of extra ATA cards to do it. They talk about some software tweaks and such. You might check that out.