Only one IDE port

[rr spyda]

I recently bought this ASUS P5B motherboard for my new computer build.
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l...79&modelmenu=1

I pretty much have everything setup but as I was preparing to put the HDD(IDE) in I realized though I have 8 SATA ports, there is only ONE IDE port. So my question is how will I be able to setup my HDD and DVD-RW with only one IDE port?

[jayb1234]

IDE ports handle 2 devices each.

The cable that attaches to the board has 2 connectors on it for your drives.

There should be one in the motherboard box.

It will look like this or this.

Hard drive goes on the end conector, DVD on the middle one.
Set the jumpers on both drives to cable select.

[rr spyda]

Ok thanks!

[RJ]

If it's your only hard drive, you should know that burning DVDs will take twice as long, as only one drive can use the IDE bus at a time so they have to alternate between using IDE and waiting for the other drive. If you could burn a DVD in 6 minutes, it'll take 12.

If it's a newly purchased hard drive, I would return it and get a SATA instead. PATA is meant for optical drives only, 1 IDE port is standard on motherboards.

But as long as you can live with the increased time for transfering data from/to CD/DVD (includes ripping, burning, etc.), it will work fine.

RJ

[glc]

You are also going to have problems booting with your optical drive. The 965 chipset doesn't even have native IDE (PATA) support any more and that single IDE controller is a 3rd party chip. If you use an IDE hard drive, and the CD just happens to boot, I'm pretty sure you will need a floppy to load the 3rd party IDE drivers to get the hard drive recognized by Setup. The new chipsets are essentially SATA-only. SATA optical drives are just starting to show up.