controller card???

[scott123]

ok, first i'll say that i have a WD 40gb drive for the OS and programs. i also have a 120gb maxtor drive for large files/video files. i would like to purchase another 120gb or 160gb hard drive for my computer. in order to get two more IDE ports do i need a "controller card"?? im not sure what they are really card, or which kinds i'm looking for. could someone send me a link for one?

[juppy]

Hi scott123,
I assume you already have some CD drives or something slaved to the other two hard drives? (Each IDE cable can handle two devices). If so, then yeah you'll need a controller card for the third hard drive. Promise makes a good one and there's another good brand but I seem to be having a brain fart tonight, as I can't remember the other brand. :rolleyes:
Here's a link for the Promise card though. hth :)
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PROMISE CARD (http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?DEPA=&submit=Go&description=promise+ultra133tx2)

[bailey]

just a word of caution here, I have run into the problem where there is a problem running differant brand drives on the same port of the controler cards, you may end up having same brand drives on each port,

[Tiretool]

I believe you're looking for something like this (http://www.koutech.com/proddetail.asp?linenumber=106). They sell these at www.newegg.com with RAID capability.

Hope that helps!

[pam123]

I've been researching the same question.
This is High Point from newegg:http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=manufactory&catalog=11&manufactory=1640&DEPA=1&sortby=14&order=1
I've got my eye on that Promise card juppy shows because it looks like one you can hook an optical drive to; which you can't with many of the others

[scott123]

Originally posted by bailey
just a word of caution here, I have run into the problem where there is a problem running differant brand drives on the same port of the controler cards, you may end up having same brand drives on each port,

i can't make any sense out of what you said. could you word that differently?

[pam123]

Bailey means that drives in a raid array have to match exactly if the setup is to work.
I don't think it holds true in a non-raid setup but he's right to point it out as something you may want to consider when you go shopping.

[juppy]

I'll try to reword what bailey said for ya (bailey > correct me if I don't explain it like you meant :) ).
I think what he's saying is with a controller card you get two more IDE channels, hence you can control up to four more drives (2 per channel). The problem being with running two different brands of hard drive on the same cable (i.e. having a Maxtor as the master and a Western Digital as the slave on the same cable). You would correct this by putting, say, only Maxtors as both drives on one channel and only WD's on the other channel. Where you are only adding one more drive right now you probably wouldn't run into this problem. Maybe down the road though if you decide to add more hard drives you might want to keep the brand relations in mind though.
Was that what you meant bailey?

[bailey]

ok I'll try

promise controler card with one maxtor 40 g drives as master on each port, working great. tried to install a new wd drive on the controler card and it would not reconize it at all, take the maxtors off and it would see the wd drive, put one maxtor and the wd on the ports it would not see the maxtor, the only way to get it to work with all 3 drives was to put the wd on one port master by its self and then put the two maxtors on the second port together , everything set as cs, and it would work great.

my point is you may not be able to mix two differant brand drives on the same port

hope this is clear enough, it sure had me confused for a while.

maxtor 40g w98se
maxtor 40g xp-pro
wd 180g 1 partition for storage

[Confused]

I ran into the same problem Bailey is talking about. I had some old PC's with drives that had data I wanted off. I got a Promise ATA66 card. The drives were 1 Seagate, 1 Quantum, and 2 Conners. The seagate would not play nice with any of the other three on the controller card. Wound up slaving the Quantum to the HD on IDE 1 and putting the Seagate on one of the Promise channels by itself and the Conners on the other controller card channel.
Chas

[bailey]

yes, you all got the idea now