PCI IDE controller and DVD burner

[RonAmato]

I'm using all 4 onboard IDE connections - 2 master 2 slave. I wish to add a DVD writer to my PC without changing around the 4 IDE devices I already have. Is it feasible to connect the new DVD writer via a PCI IDE controller card - would anyone care to offer some advice or info on potential problems I could encounter doing things this way?

Thanks for listening.

Ron

[bailey]

last I heard is you do not want to connect any optical drives to the controller card.
connect only the hard drives to it and use the motherboard ide ports for the optical drives.

on my sustem I have 4 hard drives on the promise controler card and 4 optical drives on the motherboard ide ports, it works best when set up that way
the burner drives are the master and the rom drives are the slaves

port one is cdrw master and the dvdrom as the slave
port 2 is the dvdrw master and the cdrom as the slave

[HAL9000]

PCI IDE controllers as Bailey stated are meant for hard disks only. I have seen a rare occasion where it works, but you're best off to move a hard disk to the controller card.