Connecting stuff to motherboard

[ElecroFreak2002]

I need to know how to connect a cd-rw and a dvd-ROM both to my motherboard. I only have 2 slots and one has gone to my hard drive. Your help is appreciated. Thanks.

[juppy]

If by "slots" you mean the IDE hookups, all you have to do is put the cd-rw and dvd-rom on the same cable. Each IDE cable can handle 2 devices. Just set both of them to cable select and plug the blue plug into the motherboard, one drive on the black plug and the other drive on the gray plug. This is if you have a standard IDE cable with 3 total plugs. If it only has two plugs (not sure if they make those anymore or not), just go get one with the three colored connectors mentioned above.

[ElecroFreak2002]

what is i have to hook up 5 things total? I have to hook up a floppy, zipp, hard drive, cd-rw, and dvd-rom.

[juppy]

There should be a separate connector for the floppy drive. Should be around the same area of the two IDE connectors. I don't know how the zip drive hooks up though. If you DO end up with more than 4 IDE devices, you can get an add on IDE card that plugs into a PCI slot and it will give you more IDE channels. The better ones are made by Promise. Shouldn't need it for that setup though.

[LawyerRon]

Electro, your motherboard has two IDE channels, primary and secondary. Each IDE channel can support two IDE "devices".
The floppy goes on its own floppy controller plug.

You only have 4 IDE devices; your hard drive, zip, burner, and dvd.

Each IDE channel can have a "master" and a "slave".

The hard drive must be the "master" on the primary IDE channel; you can make the burner the "slave". On the secondary IDE channel you can put the DVD as master and the zip as slave if you want.


Post back if you need more help.

[ILLPHIL]

Lawyer wouldn't putting the burner on the same IDE as the hard drive slow it down????????

If both disc drives are on the same IDE can you burn from 1 to the other??

[Tuf]

Ideally it's best to have everything on it's own channel but unfortunately you can't always do that. If it were me I would add a controller card but if I didn't I would have the Hard drive and the DVD on the primary channel and the CDRW and the Zip on the secondary. If your movies have little pauses in them you may want to switch the Zip and DVD around.

Everybody is going to have a different opinion but I would keep the Burner and the hard drive on seperate cables. Personally I don't want anything else on a cable with the hard drive that's why I would use a controller card.

Promise, Adaptec, and SIIG all make reasonably priced ones (ATA/No RAID). Lately I have used several SIIG controllers and honestly I think for they are better than Promise and they are cheaper.

[Spyda]

I have the HDD on its own IDE and a CDRW and DVD on the secondary, although with some burning programs I am told that i cant do disc to disc burning because they are on the same IDE cable.

[ktkendall]

Your probably right about disk to disk burning with both devices on same IDE cause they can not transfer data simultaneousely, each must wait his turn to have access to the channel.

[ILLPHIL]

"I always save data to the hard drive first and then burn the data from the hard drive to the CD-RW" --Cricket
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...3&pagenumber=3

After reading this sugestion that Cricket made to me I thought that is seems like a good system of burning. From HDD to cd is probably faster than cd to cd, and there is back-up on HDD just in case something goes wrong.(PROBABLY NOT GONNA)