[JemyM]

It isnt good to become dependent on a certain type of hardware, especially not when you will need to replace that hardware sooner or later.

I have four decent ATA drives from Western Digital. 1x80, 2x120 and 1x250.
As you may guess, I also have a DVD Reader and a CD Burner, a total of 6 IDE Devices.

As you may also guess, I am very happy about having 570gb of hd space, and I am using it all with the four ports I have on my EpoX motherboard.


Having 6 IDE Devices, none serial, seems to become a pain now when its time to grab a new hammer-capable motherboard. I like to ask the 'techies' that truthfully understand the specifications of the latest chipsets, to give me a clue what I should look for. All hammerboards that I have seen so far seems to have only have two non-serial IDE ports... but I defenitly need four. Or three.

Solution?

[Mertsch]

an ATA card for PCI slot ... if u want 4 slot there needs to be a RAID ATA controller onboard but if they put a RAID controller on it its a SATA RAID one ... which is reasonable and sensefull so get a RAID controllercard or just a normal ATA card and don't worry about upgrades anymore

[alias]

Gigabyte have extra, mine 4-pata 4-sata

[El_Coyote]

yea i use a IDE controller for 3 of my harddisks and only use the system ide ports for my cdrom/rw's and my system disc. that way you could get any motherboard you like and still use your ata discs.

[JemyM]

Spamkiller killed all my notifications from this thread.
Sorry for not replying for awhile.

Mertsch/El_Coyote: Is PCI slot ATA controlles equal to motherboard controllers?
Thing is, that my PCI slots are VERY crowded already...