Multiple IDE DEVICES

[idlebones]

Hello to all.

I would really appreciate it of you could give me some advice as that dreaded upgrade time has arrived and I would like a piece of your wisdom as I am pretty much uninformed about anything after the P3. (P4's and AMD's that is..)
Unfortunately I have alrerady placed my order as I was pressed for time from my supplier but I would like to confirm that what I have ordered will cover my needs..pretty lame huh??

First of all I want to state my system specs:
P3 1000
768MB RAM 133MHz
3 HDD : 1 40 GB, 2 20 GB
GeForce2 GTS
Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer
52X CD-ROM
12x PC-DVD ROM
running on Win XP PRO

My problem was that I had recently also purchased a Plextor 24x
CD Writter and I had the box open in order to switch cables according to my needs.
I had read somewhere that some of the new motherboards allow multiple connections (even up to 8) so I decided to upgrade both the motherboard and processor togeteher. I decided to go with an Athlon XP instead of the Intle Pentium 4 cause I heard that they are much faster plus they cost around 20-30% less.

So this what I ordered, hoping that will allow me to connect all the aforementioned IDE devices on to my Pc :

ASUS A7V266-E MotherBoard
with a AMD XP 1900+ CPU
and 1GB 266MHZ

Will this setup do my job??
I am not so much interested in miroring e.t.c right now but I how I can learn a bit more about it through this site in the future..

Any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated..
Thanks

[Mr. C]

To the best of my knowledge that mobo has a typical dual channel IDE configuration with 2 IDE connectors on the board for a total of 4 IDE devices.
You might want to get a card to allow more, or consider upgrading one of your HDD's to a larger capacity and letting go of one.

[Darthtanion]

That particular board has the option of having a RAID adapter built in or a plain one. Since you're talking about mirroring, you'll need to order the RAID version, or get a separate add-on RAID adapter. I'd probably just go with the onboard version, though. They have improved immensely over the past couple of years, and are as functional and reliable as the old promise add-on cards. It will also save you a PCI slot for something more interesting later on down the line.

If you decide to save a few dollars and just get the normal board, then you will be limited to the four IDE devices that Mr C was talking about.
<hr>
Whoops... just noticed that you said that you weren't interested in mirroring... Oh well, the answer is still the same. :)

Good luck!

[JediAgent]

You could buy the asus and try to add all IDE devices to work individually (not raid) b/c that board in "E" version does support 8 IDE. If the raid controller wont work in anything but raid, raid teh 20's in 0 and boot from them. Its pretty fast.

[Orestis]

The "E" version of the board, is indeed RAID.... So, if you want to have all your disks and CD/DVD/CD-RW on it, the following config would probably be the best:

2X20Gb HDDs on the raid controller...Use RAID 0 (striping), if you're not interested in mirroring...it greatly increases the speed, by writing to/reading from the two disks in parallel.

Normal controller, Primary channel: 40 Gb HDD Master, 52X CD-ROM Slave
Normal controller, Secondary channel: DVD, CD-RW.

This config will allow more reliable recording from all Hard disks and from the CD-ROM to the CD-RW.