Motherboard not compatible?

[Nerian]

My cousin recently went to buy a computer on his own with very little knowledge about computers. He bought an Asustek P5GD1 Proactive motherboard.

This board supports RAID and SATA etc. etc. but the problem is he has 2 ATA harddisks and 2 CD drives , 1 of which is a DVD writer. So the thing is i have 2 connectors , 1 is labelled Pri IDE , the other RAID. If i plug the HD wire into Pri IDE , only the harddrives are usable but not the CD drives and vice versa.

How do i get the 2 working together... or do i need to get a SATA drive. From what i see there are 4 SATA connectors on the board.

 

[Twilling]

Very simple to purchase a IDE controller card for your IDE devices. Also you could set up devices in a master slave arrangement. Normally you can plug two IDE devices into a connector one as master the other as slave... But I would just get a IDE controller card If I were you. I'd plug the ROM drives into the motherboard IDE, (one as Master the other as slave) and run the hard drive off the IDE controller card.

 

[Matthias99]

You probably need to go into the BIOS and tell it to use the "RAID" connector as another regular IDE port (assuming it supports this!) I'd check the manual...

Otherwise, you can either get SATA drives or an IDE controller card.

 

[Duvie]

Or better yet you can get a little controller card that plugs into the back of ther ide of the rive to make it have SATA plug...very simple I use one to have my old IDE backup drive a master on its own channel ( an open SATA channel )...that and some mobos have problems with SATA and PATA drives at same time and using the SATA drive as the boot...

 

[tomcas1]

You should be able to put the hard drives on the raid connector and the cd drives on the Pri IDE. You will have to make sure the driver for the raid controller is installed (page5-28) and the bios settings are correct. Read the manual.

 

[Nerian]

But wasn't RAID suppose to work with 2 similar drives? I have a 20gb and a 80gb ATA drives , 1 is from Seagate , the other Western Digital. I didn't bring the manual back with me though , i assumed it was in the box when i took it...

I'll get the manual and try again.

 

[Roach Mann]

You should be able to run 6 drives on that board, there are 3 ide connections,
(1)Pri. IDE, (1)Pri. Raid, and(1)Sec. Raid(red connector facing the front of the board).
I had 2 many bad experiances raiding drives together so I don't do it.
I have an 80gb sata, 20gb ata on pri. raid, DVD RW on pri. ide, and DVD rom on sec. raid. Works great. Make sure your bios is settings are correct and that you have a 24 pin PSU or a 550w> 20pin. I know it won't run on 500w 20pin

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: Roach Mann
You should be able to run 6 drives on that board, there are 3 ide connections,
(1)Pri. IDE, (1)Pri. Raid, and(1)Sec. Raid(red connector facing the front of the board).
I had 2 many bad experiances raiding drives together so I don't do it.
I have an 80gb sata, 20gb ata on pri. raid, DVD RW on pri. ide, and DVD rom on sec. raid. Works great. Make sure your bios is settings are correct and that you have a 24 pin PSU or a 550w> 20pin. I know it won't run on 500w 20pin

I have a similar board (Intel 915PBL), and it runs a 3.4GHz P4 fine with the 20-pin Antec True 380 that came with the Sonta case. Of course, that dinky little 380W PSU has 24A on the +12V rail, more amps than some generic 500W PSUs. Also, my board has an extra molex connector to feed the x16 slot if you have a power hungy card and you're using a 20-pin PSU. The Asus doesn't seem to have that connector, that could potentially be why this board NEEDS a 24-pin PSU. From what I've read, though, you ought to be in pretty good shape with a 915/925 mobo if you get a good quality name brand PSU around 400-450W with good amps on the 12V rails. Of course, if you are planning on a 570J processor and 6800 Ultra you may want to spring for a nice EPS PSU just to be on the safe side.