Multiple PCI IDE Controllers?

[wumpuskiller]

I've got a video editing PC that already has standard on-board IDE controllers and a Promise Ultra133 PCI IDE controller. I run my 2 DVD burners as primary devices on the on-board IDE controllers and connect 2 separate 120GB HDD's as primary device on the 2 Promise IDE channels.

Just picked up a WD250GB 8MB drive to replace one of the 120GB HDD's. The 250GB WD drive came with a PCI IDE controller. So instead of replacing one of the 120's, my question is whether I can add the IDE controller that came with the 250GB drive and run 6 separate IDE channels in the PC (each with 1 device as 'master'). That would give me the best config for video work. I'm not interested in running a RAID setup. I have an open PCI slot....just wondering about device/irq/interrupt conflicts etc. Running WinXP Home edition.

TIA for any info.
wumpus....

 

[helpmeout]

I've been told that a controller card should be plugged into the last PCI slot to avoid conflicts. However, I was told this after I installed mine in the first slot. I have no problems, so I left it there. As for more than one controller card, why not just try it. Not a lot of effort required. How about your power supply, though? Is it going to handle all these drives? If you put in the second card and the big HD, then have a problem, you might be wrong when you figure it's the card.

 

[Lord Evermore]

With XP there should be no issue with conflicts. However you may not have much bandwidth left for PCI devices if you do much that involves more than one drive reading/writing at the same time. You can install the new drive as a slave and have no performance issues if your activities don't involve both that master and the slave transferring data at the same time. There is no loss of performance simply due to being a slave, or a port having a master and slave on it, only if they both are trying to use the port for data simultaneously.

I think the boot order would choose the PCI slot with the lowest number first to look for a bootable drive, since that is how priority is assigned. Some BIOS setups also allow you to specify which hard drive or bootable card to boot from.

 

[wumpuskiller]

I was looking to keep each HDD as primary on a separate ide channel just so that I wouldn't have to worry about whether both drives would getting hit at the same time (copy operations, burning, editing, etc).

I'll install that new card (don't know the brand yet...still in sealed anti-static bag) and see what happens. worst case i can use in another puter and just hook up the new drive as a slave on existing promise controller.


thanks for the responses.