Hi guys. I’d been considering about whether to buy a PCI IDE controller card to allow me to add another hard disk, or swap my Asus 4012A CDRW & Lite-on CD-rom drives onto the IDE controller card & allow me to add another HDD onto the secondary ATA controller,(I’ve got 2HDD+2 CD drives occupying all my slots currently).
What sort of IRQ resources will a IDE controller card require? Can they coexist with a Soundblaster Live! or Geforce 3 card (in terms of IRQ M/b resources), & yet operate efficiently at tasks like video capturing for example?
Likewise would there be issues if I plugged the CD drives into the controller card rather than running them off the motherboard ATA controller instead?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts guys.
I never had any conflict isssues from what I remember with the PCI IDE card and have several other PCI devices installed: Creative SB Audigy player 5.1, Haupauge Nicam TV tuner and a network card. Also, I haven’t seen it affect the performance of Video capturing or have any affect on graphics performance, such as on checking with 3D-Mark. The card does use two extra IRQs; one for each controller, but on my system, they are shared with other devices from what I remember. I know of many people who use IDE controller cards like mine to use two hard drives simultaneously along with two CD/DVD-ROM drives and a Zip drive. The only problem I heard of is that some older PCs (PII 233MHz, etc.) cannot be configured to boot of a hard drive or CD-ROM drive connected to the PCI IDE controller, but I never heard of anyone having any sort of comflict issues.