Hi .. my mobo has only 2 ide connectors on it.1 is for my 2 hdd's and the other is for my dvd reader and cdrw.i just got a prezzie from santa,a dvdrw and was wondering if i can use all 3 drives together ?,even tho' i need another ide connector.can i buy a ide splitter of some sort?? any suggestions please guy's
a lot of DVD-RW drives also have CD-RW functionality.. you should see if yours does also. If not, invest money for a PCI IDE card. I have a PCI UDMA66 controller with 2 extra IDE channels which allows me to have the 6 IDE drives that I have currently, and room for 2 more!
Slaine, Throw out your DVD reader and insert your DVD-RW instead? Or do as VCDjunkie says, throw out the CD-RW drive if your DVD-RW can write CD-Rs and CD-RWs.
thanks for the tips.i realise i could lose the dvd reader and still use my dvdrw ,however, i really want to keep all 3 drives as my cdrw is a 40x cd writer and the dvdrw (pioneer 105)is only 16xcd writer!. i am planning to us the dvd drives to copy 'on the fly' and still use my new 40x cdrw for copying cd's at 40x. do you see my little dilemma hehe .i might just have to buy a pci ide card as you suggest.
You could try this, If you do, it would be very interesting to know how it works. http://store.yahoo.com/jazztechnology/housbranfirt.html Supports up to 63 IDE devices with up to 400Mbps (though it will never achieve that transfer rate over a sustained period)
As already suggested, why not consider a PCI ATA 100 or 133 Card just in case you get another harddrive in the future as well? The only drawback I've noticed with putting any optical drives on my Promise ATA133 Tx2 card was that Mount Rainier [Easywrite] reader software [like the UDF reader] could not be installed and run correctly.
which is exactly why I keep my optical drives on my secondary onboard controller, and my PCI UDMA66 controller has 2 secondary hard drives on it.. ;-)
