It isnt good to become dependent on a certain type of hardware, especially not when you will need to replace that hardware sooner or later.

I have four decent ATA drives from Western Digital. 1x80, 2x120 and 1x250.
As you may guess, I also have a DVD Reader and a CD Burner, a total of 6 IDE Devices.

As you may also guess, I am very happy about having 570gb of hd space, and I am using it all with the four ports I have on my EpoX motherboard.


Having 6 IDE Devices, none serial, seems to become a pain now when its time to grab a new hammer-capable motherboard. I like to ask the 'techies' that truthfully understand the specifications of the latest chipsets, to give me a clue what I should look for. All hammerboards that I have seen so far seems to have only have two non-serial IDE ports... but I defenitly need four. Or three.

Solution?

an ATA card for PCI slot ... if u want 4 slot there needs to be a RAID ATA controller onboard but if they put a RAID controller on it its a SATA RAID one ... which is reasonable and sensefull so get a RAID controllercard or just a normal ATA card and don't worry about upgrades anymore

Gigabyte have extra, mine 4-pata 4-sata

yea i use a IDE controller for 3 of my harddisks and only use the system ide ports for my cdrom/rw's and my system disc. that way you could get any motherboard you like and still use your ata discs.

Spamkiller killed all my notifications from this thread.
Sorry for not replying for awhile.

Mertsch/El_Coyote: Is PCI slot ATA controlles equal to motherboard controllers?
Thing is, that my PCI slots are VERY crowded already...