adding another hard drive..

[suffocate]

i have a abit nf7.
i have 2 channels
my config is

ide channel 1->ibm 20gb|2->wd 80gb 8mb se
ide channel 2->1->dvd rom.|2->dvd burner

i need to add another hard drive. but i am out of channels. i was told that i need to obtain a ide controler card.. that runs off the pci bus.
i was thinking that it could possibly create a big bottleneck within the drives+other pci devices...

can someone tell me how exaclty the cards work. what my options are.

and what some good brands are.

 

[CyberCecil]

I currently have mine setup like this:

80GB Master
DVD-ROM Slave

120GB Master
DVD-RW Slave

160GB Single (on Promise IDE PCI controller)

I have not seen any problems with this setup.

I have a Maxtor rebadged version of this:

Promise Ultra 100

You might want this one:

Promise Ultra 133

You just have to make sure it will support drives larger than 137GB (all newer ones should) and you shouldn't have any problems.

 

[Ice Czar]

technically, the IDE channels are already on the PCI bus
controlled by the Southbridge chipset, and they all share the same 133MB/s maximum transfer and Direct Memory Access
(the new SATA standard and chipsets are a little different)

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/buses/types/pci.htm
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/pci2.htm

by adding a card your simply adding more channels
however as devices are added to the bus, there is more traffic (if they are concurrenetly doing something) and have to wait for each other, of course its alot easier to talk about saturating the IDE or PCI bus than it is to actually do it. One of the ways is to run a multiuser environment\storage, another to run a RAID array with a large number of drives, (and then actually use it, like in video editing\capture)

if your just looking for another IDE controller
Id recommend either
Promise Technology
Highpoint Technology