[vmpaul]

Can I have more than 2 drives daisy chained on an IDE Controller chip?

I was planning on adding a 3rd HD to my G3 Desktop(Blue & White) and was told by a store clerk that I could have only 2 drives connected to the main controller chip. He said I would have to get a PCI expansion card for the 3rd drive.

Is this correct?

[OldManMac]

Generally, an IDE controller can support four devices, but I believe that two of the four on the B&W run at a slower speed (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, anyone), which means you could run one off the CD drive IDE connector, but it would be slower. You're better off getting one of these and putting it in a PCI slot, for optimum speed.

[taffy]

On the onboard ide interface, there are 2 channels, and each channel can support 2 devices, one as master and the other as the slave. Now if you already have 2 hard drives in there, you probably have it both on one channel. That leaves you to utilizing the other channel; one device that's already on the second channel would be the cd drive, leaving the slave on the 2nd channel empty. It might not be the case if you have a zip drive... if you have a zip drive, you would have to go with a pci ide card. If not, you can set the 3rd hard drive as the slave on the same channel as the cd drive. Performance may not be optimal, but in my opinion it'll beat the hassle of running an pci ide card.. (pci-ide cards arn't always the most compatible devices).

or even better, just get one of those western digital 120gb drives with 8 meg cache.. it'll be the fastest choice.. the western digital 120gbs are known to beat scsi drives .

-ck

[vmpaul]

Wow taffy, you must be related to Miss Cleo. You read the situation exactIy. I do have the 2 hard drives on one controller (master & slave) and a CD and Zip drive on the other.

In fact, I'm trying to mount a Western digital 120gb drive I bought today as my third.

So you don't think running one of those Sonnet cards KarlG suggested will give me good performance? If I got one would I have to make sure it's a particular bus speed (PCI100 or 133) or do I get the fastest I can afford?

[taffy]

heh

in that case, i think the only choice you're left with is to go with a pci-ide card... no, there isn't much point to buying a ata133 device as they realistically provide minimal difference in performance.. go with a sonnet ata100 pci ide card or comparable brand.

However, i looked at xlr8yourmac.com briefly regarding the sonnet card, and it seems there are some compatiblity problems... i think you should definitely look this over first.

The link is: http://xlr8yourmac.com/IDE.html#controllers

-ck

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by taffy:
<STRONG>

The link is: http://xlr8yourmac.com/IDE.html#controllers

-ck</STRONG>

Thanks taffy. That's a helpful link. I'm going to have to read everything there. I'm having a hard time getting these Jumper settings correct. At one point I couldn't get any of my three drives to mount.

Is there a problem from using a drive on a controller card as your startup? I can't seem to get that to happen. It may be my jumper settings. They really seem to be more of an art than a science. I hate this part of computers. It reminds me of those days when you had to get lucky with daisy-chaining SCSI devices.

[TNproud2b]

Not sure if you can boot from a drive that's attached to a PCI expansion card. The BIOS (firmware) needs to have the option available before it will work.

Each IDE channel(usually there's 2, a Primary and a Secondary channel) can support 2 IDE devices. - one slave & one master per cable.

The computer will generally (by default) boot from the drive that is attached to the Primary channel and jumpered to 'master'.


If changing jumpers between master and slave gets you nowhere (not detec ted) - try the 'cable select' setting.

There should be no performance penalty for having a CDROM and harddrive on the same cable (channel). Only one device can be accessed at a given moment - unlike SCSI which must run as slow as the slowest peripheral.