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Not enough IDE ports!

G

GnatGoSplat

Golden Member
I have several machines with 2 IDE devices, hard drive and DVD-ROM.

I upgraded them to nVidia 6100-430 based motherboards without enough forethought to check the number of IDE connectors on them first. Turns out they only have 1 IDE connector and the rest are SATA. Unfortunately for me, running the cable to both drives with the HDD being master and DVD being slave would result in the cables being too short. So I have to decide a new plan of attack, preferably without replacing either the HD or DVD drive.

1. Does anyone know a source for cables that are not just longer, but has a long distance between the master and slave connectors?
2. If such cables don't exist, I can get an extension cable to go from the middle connector to the DVD drive. Problem is, they're all 40-wire. Will that matter for an extension cable? The motherboard will still see the main cable as 80-wire and the extension will only be maybe 8-10" tops.
3. Does the HD have to be master? Could I make the DVD drive master and HD as slave? That way I could use a regular IDE cable and length wouldn't be a problem. I just always make the HD master because I've heard you're supposed to.
4. Does putting the HD and DVD burner on the same cable as master and slave reduce performance? In the past, I have always heard it's best to make them both master on their own separate IDE channels. Does it matter nowadays?

I did try an SATA-to-IDE converter with a Silicon Image chipset. It worked fine on the HD, but incurred a rather sizable performance hit so I'd rather not use it. On my NEC DVD burner, it didn't work at all with any UDMA, MWDMA, or SWDMA mode. I had to use PIO which incurs a significant performance hit (can't get speeds higher than 2x).

Any ideas?
 
Can't help you with no. 1 I don't know. I know you can reverse the 40 wire cables to change the spacing, have done it many times. I tried it once on an 80 wire cable and no drives were detected.
For no 2. You only need the 80 wire cables for hard drives, ATA 100 and ATA 133 speeds. The 40 wire cables are only good up to ATA 66 which is fast enough for optical drives. I don't know if the extensions will work though, I've never seen or tried them.
For no 3 No the HD doesn't have to be master. If you use the master slave jumpers the hard drive can still be master and connected to the middle IDE connector. The master only has to be on the end if you use the cable select jumpers.
For no 4. No todays motherboards use Independent Master/Slave Device Timing. One won't slow down the other. It was true in the past.

One option is to add an IDE PCI controller card.

 
I'd suggest adding a PCI IDE controller as mentioned above. They are less than $20. shipped now (oops, looks like the price has gone up a bit at the Egg - I'm sure if you shop around you'll find it for less - I know geeks.com usually has them or you can get the cheaper Via based cards that the Egg has). This is the one I always keep on hand for emergencies: Syba ATA133/RAID. It has just about every feature you could want in an IDE controller and you can use just what you want of them. Install the drivers and reboot before you install the card and there will be no problem with it being properly recognized. And always check the mfr's web site for the latest drivers and utilities.

.bh.
 
Thanks for the replies.

I actually found a solution that cost me nothing and the reason I didn't realize it before was because of my own stupidity! 😱

I had always thought it didn't matter what position on the cable you put the Master and Slave, so long as they're properly set to Master and Slave. So what I did was I set my DVD burner to Slave and assumed my hard drive was set to Master. In fact, I was positive it was set to Master. I didn't even double check the jumper, I was that sure. Anyway, it didn't work. The machine said it couldn't find a boot drive. So I unplugged the DVD burner and it was still doing the same thing with just the HD hooked up to the middle plug. When I plugged in the end connector instead, then it booted. I then incorrectly assumed that maybe 80-wire cables are different and slaves must be on the middle connector and masters on the end. Thanks to 13black's confirmation that my original understanding was correct, I went and double-checked my HD's jumpers and found it was on CS. D'oh!!! I set it to master and now all is well. The IDE cable is just long enough so no adapters, extensions, or cards need to be purchased. 😱

Interestingly though, I think my motherboard NEEDS the HD as Master to boot. Without a HD as master, I get an error message "No HDD on Primary Master".

A PCI IDE card would have been a good idea, but wouldn't have worked for me because my PCI slots are all full thanks to modern motherboards having so few of them in lieu of those somewhat useless PCIe x1 slots.

Thanks for the help! 😀
 
80-wire cables are all capable of CS operation. If jumper is set to CS the drive will become master or slave depending on its position on the cable. If drives are jumped to CS then the end drive (black) is master, middle drive (gray) is slave, and mobo must be on blue connector regardless - both drives must be jumped to CS for this to work. If you set one drive to Master and the other to Slave then their position on the cable is irrelevant though convention is still to put master on end and slave in the middle.
And yes, the HDD you want to be the boot HDD should always either be set to Master or if set to CS, must be properly located on the 80-wire cable (black connector - end). Some drives (mostly WD) have two master positions: one for stand alone, and the other for Master with Slave present.

Moral: Be consistent!

.bh.
 
IDE cables, if they're supposed to work, cannot be longer than 45 cm (18").

The solution is to leave the optical drive on IDE, and either get a SATA HDD or put the existing one on a SATA-IDE dongle.
 
Seriously dude, SATA.
I only have one Parallel device and its a dual-layer burner, and I'd get a serial one of those if I could find it.

PATA takes up way too much space and you have to worry about the whole master/slave BS.
Forget that. Too painful.
Make the switch. Serial has been out for a long time now.
 
Originally posted by: shortylickens
Seriously dude, SATA.
I only have one Parallel device and its a dual-layer burner, and I'd get a serial one of those if I could find it.

PATA takes up way too much space and you have to worry about the whole master/slave BS.
Forget that. Too painful.
Make the switch. Serial has been out for a long time now.
Click to expand...

I guess that officially makes me a luddite because I still buy primarily PATA drives.
 
Originally posted by: eplebnista
Originally posted by: shortylickens
Seriously dude, SATA.
I only have one Parallel device and its a dual-layer burner, and I'd get a serial one of those if I could find it.

PATA takes up way too much space and you have to worry about the whole master/slave BS.
Forget that. Too painful.
Make the switch. Serial has been out for a long time now.
Click to expand...

I guess that officially makes me a luddite because I still buy primarily PATA drives.
Click to expand...

Not really, there are several statements that can be found across the internet that SATA provides no substantial gains over PATA. Sure, benches might come out a bit higher, but otherwise for most tasks the difference is neglible(sp?). I've personally only moved to SATA because of the cabling issue. Otherwise, I used to have a boot drive that was a 40gb PATA for a long time.
 
Hey Epleb...

Some of the Silicon Image based cards support hard drives only due to limitations in the hard-burned BIOS on the card. Look for one that supports all types of drives unless you're sure all you'll ever need from the card is HDD support. That's why I keep the card I linked on hand - it supports anything from the slowest LS-120 to the fastest PATA HDD. You can find basically the same card under several names: Rosewill and Koutech among them.

.bh.
 
Seriously, with SATA DVD-ROM drives now going for less than $20, why bother? PCI-IDE cards are more expensive ...
 
Originally posted by: Peter
Seriously, with SATA DVD-ROM drives now going for less than $20, why bother? PCI-IDE cards are more expensive ...
Click to expand...

Well, I am looking to upgrade the motherboard, cpu, ram, and video card on a relative's pc. I have done incremental upgrades for them the last couple of years and they want to re-use the relatively new 16x pata dvd burner (which includes a very good dvd-editing software bundle that is tied to the drive, well afaik it is) and pata hard drive instead of buying new ones. The motherboard I am going to be using is a gigabyte p31. It has one ide connector, that I plan on using with the dvd burner. I like having one drive per connector, hence the pci ide card for the hard drive. 🙂
 
You realize that PCI IDE is slow, and a major system bandwidth hog?

And what's that PCI IDE going to cost, more or less than a SATA DVD-ROM drive?
 
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