Ken said:
According to a retailer here in Tucson,
his distributer told him the p4r800-vm
has been discontinued. I am now looking
at the p5gd1-vm and the p5gdc-v but was
wondering if they can support two IDE
hard drives and two CD-DVDrw drives. Any
help would be appreciated. Thanks.
KEN
Boards which use the 915/925, tend to use ICH6(R)
as the Southbridge. That chip has one IDE cable
and four SATA cables. This is in keeping with the
obsolescence of parallel IDE cabled disks (which is
all I own
. To make up for this, some Asus boards
use an ITE8212 chip, which supports vanilla IDE or
RAID, and also handles hard drives or CD devices
(ATAPI). You could put the two hard drives on the
one Southbridge cable, and put the DVDrw on the ITE8212
or vice versa. (Note - there is a weird comment about
the ITE8212 supporting only two Ultra ATA hard drives,
and as there are two cables and room for four drives,
I don't understand what they are saying. You may want
to search around and get some clarification. I'm having
trouble locating any reviews that benched the 8212.)
P5GD1-VM LGA775, build in video or PCI Express x16,
ITE8211F single cable IDE! plus Southbridge
has single cable. DDR memory.
P5GDC-V LGA775, build in video or PCI Express x16,
ITE8212F two cable IDE plus Southbridge
has single cable. DDR and DDR2 memory slots.
http://www.iteusa.com/product_info/PC/pc_product_info_2.asp
Nothing in the ITE docs suggest any limits.
The P5GD1-VM apparently is only using one of the two
cable interfaces on the ITE8211F. So, there is one
IDE cable from the 8211F and one from the Southbridge.
The 8211F seems to differ from the 8212F, in that it
doesn't have an interface for a flash chip, a trivial
difference (as I bet Asus won't use the flash chip
interface in any case).
So, that still leaves the question about whether the 8212
really has a two hard drive limit. The limit could be in
vanilla ATA mode, and maybe in RAID mode you can use four
hard drives on it. After all, it is supposed to support
RAID 0+1, and I think that takes four drives.
There is another comment about the 8212 here. Apparently
in RAID mode, it has poor write performance. And, like
some other infamous RAID devices, messes up real time
performance.
http://groups.google.ca/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&[email protected]
Maybe the right answer is to pick up a PCI IDE controller
and use that.
HTH,
Paul
