Pete wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I have a typical P4 2.6 system with 2 IDE connectors on my motherboard. I
> have 2 DVD burners and 1 IDE hard disk (main system drive) on my machine.
> All the drives are installed and working OK but I get problems with access
> speeds / bandwidth when I use the burner that is on the same channel as the
> hard disk.
>
> I have heard that for multiple simultaneous burners it's best that the
> burners are on separate IDE channels. I happen to have an old ABIT hot rod
> 100 raid controller card and was going to hook the main IDE drive up to this
> so that I could have the burners connected as masters on each of the ide
> channels on the motherboard and no secondary devices connected at all.
>
> Does this make sense?

This was true before dual FIFO buffers on IDE ports. It should not be necessary on your system.

> Do I need to change any bios settings to set the abit raid PCI card up as a
> master device?

Configure the Abit BIOS to disable RAID. Set the system BIOS to boot from SCSI. PCI ATA cards emulate SCSI.

> Is there a better way of doing this?

No.

> Will the Abit hot rod 100 card be OK?

Should be OK.

> Will accessing my prmary hard disk through the Abit card degrade hard disk
> access speeds?

I have used only Promise ATA cards, which work well with hard drives and have slightly better performance than on board PATA ports.

> Will using a card like the Abit raid controller on the PCI bus degrade other
> PCI or AGP devices because it may be a bandwidth hog?

It will not affect AGP at all. On board PATA ports typically connect through the PCI bus, so the hard drive will use PCI bandwidth either way.

> Please feel free to respond to any or all of the points i have raised.
>
> Any other advice / issues?

It should not be necessary to have each device on a different cable. You probably haves some other problem e.g. DMA not enabled on one or more devices.

--
Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.