How to connect up 5 IDE devices?

OSiriS

As the topic says I am looking to add a 5th IDE device to my computer.The relevent specs are as follows:

Motherboard:
Iwill KK266Plus-R

IDE devices:
10gig + 40gig Maxtor HDs
LG DVD drive
HP CD-RW
100mb Iomega Zip Drive

If more detailed info is needed let me know. I'm just wanting to know what additional cabling, and procedure to go about it (only have the base cabling for 4 IDE drives.

meglome

Hey Phill, You should be able to get an IDE Controller Card for you PC with an extra 2 or 4 channels on it, any of the good online stores should have one. Alternately you can buy a new motherboard, I would recommend one of the Abit boards with raid and 8 IDE channels.

PPC

You have raid onboard.
I have raid on mine aswell, but what i did was i changed it to a ide controller,
Now i have 5 h/d's and a dvd and a cd-r and can still put in one more

read the manual and it might explain howto.

yop

Same as, there are 4 IDE ports on that board, should allow connection of 8 devices

OSiriS

As has been pointed out (and I just checked for myself) there are indeed 2 free IDE ports ... woohoo. So will it just be a case of gettin my hands on cabling and plugging in the drive or will I need to do something in the meantime? I can't really afford to go out buying controller cards atm:/

Btw I read the manual when I bought the mobo and it was just going into how you could use raid to back up your data etc, no mention of getting it to run extra drives.

meglome

All you need then is cables. You need to be sure you get the right ide cable for the enhanced ata 66 to 100 and you may need some power splitters.

OSiriS

I got hold of an IDE cable and have everything wired up powered etc. I set the CD-RW to master and hooked it up to the 3rd IDE channel. On booting the raid manager stopped while looking for a primary master (presumably because the 1st and 3rd channels are designated primary channels, and there are 2 master drives connected). Likewise if I connect it to channel 4 a secondary master cannot be found. Would it be possible to set the CD-RW to slave and have 2 slave drives + the master running off the primary channel or am I getting it completely wrong?

Zab

I haven't checked your particular board, but a lot of RAID controllers don't support ATAPI devices. Put your CDROM etc on the standard IDE channels and the hard drives on the RAID controller. Or at least put all the ATAPI devices on the standard channels.

Zab

Gerry

Yup, what zab said. First though, install the windows drivers for your raid controller, ( the manual will tell you what make and model it is ). Then connect up your ide drives to it, put the atapi drives on the the standard channels which you have been using up to now.
Make sure in your bios setup that you have the extra controller first in the boot order, then you should be away.

These raid controllers function as perfectly normal ata hard drive controllers unless you specifically setup raid with some drives. Just to make that clear.