IDE cable fully occupied...

[Nismo83]

My IDE cable is fully occupied for I have a CDRW, CDROM and 2 HD.. i own an Intel 850GB MOBO, i was wondering whether any expert out there mind telling me how many IDE slot is there available in this kind of MOBO. I plan to get a DVD later in the future...

 

[stuy_b]

Generally unless you get a specific RAID supported motherboard, you will be able to connect 4 IDE devices. Normally this is two controllers (IRQ14&15-IDE0 & IDE1) each is capable of supporting two drives, 1 master 1 slave, connected together on 1 cable.

So you have your CD/DVD drive and CDRW on IDE0, CD/DVD master, CDRW slave. Then on IDE1 upto 2x harddisks, again 1 master , 1 slave.

Check your manual if your board supports RAID, thats a whole new ball-game.

 

[Bytes Back]

Further to this, you could of course just swap your cd for a DVD, after all a DVD does everything a CD does.

Or you get a IDE controller card which would allow you to connect another 4 devices.

 

[stkootic]

If you have an extra pci slot you can opt for a pci ide controller. This will give you room for 4 more devices.