WillofAustralia said:
Main board is___________Asus P4P800S-se_____
http://www.asus.com.tw/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=172&l1=3&l2=12&l3=29
"Storage/RAID
2 x UltraDMA 100/66/33
Built-in ICH5 supports 2 x Serial ATA"
Each IDE connector takes a ribbon cable with two connectors:
- - -
| |-------------| |---| | <--- Ribbon cable has two connectors for
- - - two IDE disk drives. One drive jumpered
Motherboard Drive Drive to "master' and one to "slave".
#1 #2
- - -
| |-------------| |---| | <--- Ribbon cable has two connectors for
- - - two IDE disk drives.
Motherboard Drive Drive
#3 #4
- -
| |-------------------| | <--- SATA cable supports one drive only
- -
Motherboard Drive #5 (SATA)
- -
| |-------------------| | <--- SATA cable supports one drive only
- -
Motherboard Drive #6 (SATA)
Using an operating system like WinXP, you can connect a total of six
storage devices (hard drives or CDROM) to the four cables shown above.
The BIOS option for the storage should be set to "Enhanced".
Using an operating system like Win98, you can only install 4 drives.
To make Win98 work, you set the BIOS option to "Compatible". Compatible
uses I/O mapping and IRQ 14 and 15, like a legacy motherboard.
There are plenty of options to support three hard drives, using the
interfaces already on your motherboard.
Here is a picture of the IDE ribbon cable. The two connectors on the
right hand end of the cable, connect to two hard drives. The bottom
cable in the picture here, has 80 wires in the cable, and those are
the best cables to use. The 40 wire cable (top one in the picture)
is not as good, and the drive will operate slower if you use a 40 wire
cable.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/ATA_cables.jpg
This is a SATA cable. It is thinner than the old ribbon cables. SATA
hard drives are the newest type.
http://www.askbobrankin.com/sata-cable.jpg
Paul