Max number of physical disks

I have an Asus P4P800 Deluxe MotherBoard on which are connected two dvd burners on one IDE channel and two IDE disks on the other IDE channel. I have two additional IDE disks connected to a Promise Ultra Storage Controller Card (it's too late that I discovered that I could have used the RAID controllers).

When I connected temporarily a SATA disk on the MB plug, my two optical readers were not recognised any more. Does this mean that the MB will only accommodate a maximum of 6 physical disks?

I am running under Intel P4 with w2k-sp4 and xp home sp1 dual boot.

 

Sorry. You've got the same rig as me and we're stuck with the 6 drive limit. 4 drives on the 2 ATA/100 channels, and 2 more drives on the SATA-150 connectors. Using the 3rd IDE channel, disables the SATA or vice versa.

 

Do the new motherboards overcome this limitation?

 

I've looked around, but haven't seen any, at prices we want to pay. You could get a SCSI card to plug into one of your PCI slots. They offer support for 6 to 14 SCSI drives. But my personal solution is to upgrade to larger drives, for my immediate working set. For medium term storage and backups you could use USB connected hard drives. That should keep you going for a while. These external drives are pretty quick on USB 2.0 and don't load the USB bus because they've got their own power supply. Long term storage could be relegated to DVD R/W disks, which is my personal favourite. However, record keeping and labeling is essential.

 

Thanks for the tips

 

[/QUOTE]Long term storage could be relegated to DVD R/W disks, which is my personal favourite. However, record keeping and labeling is essential.[/QUOTE]

To Prometheos : What backup/restore software do you use?

 

Hi Gswiss
I've used Norton Ghost for 5 years. However, recently when using Ghost it failed to restart my Windows 2000 after a failed backup. It would not reboot past the Norton Ghost partition, which was broken, so I couldn't repair the installation. I did have a Win2k boot floppy which let me bypass the broken Ghost partition which I promptly deleted after setting my C: drive back to the System boot drive. I was very unhappy with this. I won't recommend Ghost because of this very critical failure. Since then, I've been using the Microsoft Backup utility that comes with Windows. It's free and it works well enough. Critics, will exclaim that it doesn't back up every file. While that statement is correct, ( files in use are not backed up) it does back up everything that matters.
For DVD RW drives, I've found that the bundled software works reasonably well these days. My Plextor DVD RW came with the Roxio DVD Suite. It burns DVDs and CDs and has a drag-to-disk utility; very handy. The LG DVD RW came with the Nero DVD Suite. This is my favourite DVD backup software. If I was in the market to purchase DVD software I'd spend it on the Nero package.