As long as I can remember motherboards have had at least 2 IDE slots.
The last 2 I purchased (ABit KT7-RAID) actually has 4 and I enjoyed them very, very much.
But now I can't find a mobo with even the bare minimum traditional 2 IDE slots (for 4 IDE devices).

Does anyone know of a mobo that does Core Duo and has at least 2 IDE slots?
It's be great if it had one of the NVidia chipsets (ie: 680i).

Toms says the Editor's Choice "MSI 975X Platinum Power Up Edition" has 2 IDE slots.
Of course one of them is goofy and on another chip; I worry about accessing a drive before the OS really boots; like when installing an OS and what kind of strangeness can happen when trying to us a non-M$ OS.

Here's the specific page for the Toms article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/1 [...] page8.html

But MSI says the "975X Platinum V.2" board is another name for this motherboard and that it only has 1 IDE slot!

See MSI's product desc here:
http://www.msicomputer.com/product [...] 2&class=mb



Thanks in advance,

I had the same problem as you.

I found the Asus P5LD2 it has 3 IDE slots, two are on a different controller.

ever thought of buying a SATA HDD?
You can always add more IDE with an PCI/PCI-E IDE controller card

Yes, I've thought of buying a SATA HDD :-)
I think I have one of them now in fact.
But I've got a good number of IDE drives I'm interested in being able to move from PC to PC over the years; a couple 200 GB drives, a 100, and a couple smaller ones.

SATA is nothing but a triumph of marketing anyway.
A big ol' change for absolutely no real benefit.

Sure the wires are smaller, but they aren't *that* much smaller than rounded IDE cables. AND you have to run each wire all the way from the controler to the HDD. At least w/ IDE you could daisy chain 2 devices.
That really should have been in the SATA spec - being abl to daisy chain and split like you can with USB.

And sure I think the SATA spec calls for drives to be able to be faster, but my understanding is we never had HDs as fast as ATA/100 let alone ATA/133.

And why are all the mobo and chipset designers in a contest to see who can stick in the most USB ports?? Each USB controler is supposed to be able to support like 255 devices isn't it? Sure all the devices share the bandwidth, but who's hooking up 6+ USB devices that actually max out USB 2 bandwidth at the same time? I mean, sure in some rare circumstances that'd probably come up, but those are the people that need to grab an expansion card.

And speaking of expansion cards, what's the deal with the utter lack of PCI slots these days??
USB ports you can add, but PCI slots you can't.
Seems about the most PCI slots I've seen on a mobo is just 3.
Personally I like to add my own NIC for messing with when I travel, a TV Tuner, my own sound card, and a phone modem. And now it looks like I need to plug in some external IDE controler and hope for the best with that.

What a mess.
I don't mind rebooting on the rare occiason I need to change a bios setting.
I don't have a switch that'll exceed 100 mbit and only rarely use more than 10 mbit (10 mbit is FAST ppl!). I don't care that the boards have Gagebit Eithernet and I sure don't need hardware that'll team multiple NICs together for 2 Gigabits of bandwidth. That can't work well anyway, surely that breaks all kinds of networking stuff. I mean, one IP# shared by 2 MACs? That's got to confuse some hardware.

All I want is to be able to plug any bit of hardware I run into into the PC and expect it to go.

Thanks for the tip.
I'll look into the ASUS P5LD2, but I do hate that it's an extra chip on the mobo doing the IDE controling.
I've read posts about people having strange troubles with that and I've had similar problems using built in Highpoint RAID IDE controlers.

Sorry to be such a whiny b*tch, but I haven't bought a PC in a few years and was foolish enough to think there had been more positive progress made.

ASROCK 775 DUAL VSTA HAS 2.

Master-slave to get 4!

>> but my understanding is we never had HDs as fast as ATA/100 let alone ATA/133.
Sure there are but probably not your old drives. Ever heard of a raptor?

>> what's the deal with the utter lack of PCI slots these days??...
>> Personally I like to add my own NIC for messing with when I travel, a TV Tuner, my own sound card, and a phone modem.

Nic on a card? phone modem? dude... all that stuff is so yesterday. Nics, sound etc. have been onboard decent mobos since about 1995 thats why they don't need so many slots. As for a modem, nobody I know even does dialup any more.

>> only rarely use more than 10 mbit (10 mbit is FAST ppl!).
10 Mbit fast? whatever. I hope I get to meet you in unreal tournament sometime. You'll be toast in seconds.

>> ATA: a couple 200 GB drives, a 100, and a couple smaller ones.
Why are you messing with that crap? Just toss them all and buy a single 500GB sata for $149 then you're set for another 10 years. Apart from being way faster you'll probably save that much on your power bill :-)

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applica [...] u=THD-500M

>> I sure don't need hardware that'll team multiple NICs
I guess you never host lan parties then. In fact it doesn't sound like you're a gamer. Your rig is probably fine for office, emailing and surfing. Stick with it if thats all you do and don't worry about newer stuff if your rig still works for you. Just don't expect to play oblivion or be competetive in any online games.

>> ... surely that breaks all kinds of networking stuff. I mean, one IP# shared by 2 MACs? That's got to confuse some hardware.

Nope. Load balancing and teaming have been standard techniques in server farm networking for ages. BTW For teaming, both nics usually have the same mac and IP.

>>I'll look into the ASUS P5LD2... I was foolish enough to think there had been more positive progress made.

Dude, if you look at the cheapest hardware you're not gonna find innovation. Go look at the 680i motherboards like the striker extreme and tell me thats not interesting.

I think i saw an SATA->IDE adaptor/convertor on newegg once, too lazy to look it up now, maybe that would work for you?

Your gripe is well organized but let go of that old stuff. Drive will fail with age move on. Your building a state of the art system that you want to bog down with old tech.

SATA is vastly superior to IDE, perhaps they're not that much faster but they are much easily configured, and hot swappable while consuming less power.

I also don't get the gripe about the on board nic, my mobo has duel gigbit nics no issues what so ever.

Sound is still better handled by an add on, so I agree with you there.

I don't think a raptor would be much slower if it was an IDE drive, Still a good reason to buy a SATA drive though. I think the main advantage of SATA over IDE is for RAID. Compare RAID 5 performance for IDE vs SATA and you won't think it's a marketing gimmick anymore. CD/DVD drive makers need to get on the ball and make more SATA drives.

100Mbps vs 10Mbps won't make any (or not much) difference for any online games, only difference would be if you play on a LAN. Still 100Mbps/Gigabit is cheap and works great, why wouldn't you want it?

Some people still use modems, But why not get a USB modem/TV tuner, I think thats why the mobo manufacturers include all those USB ports you are complaining about.

Also:

I wouldn't buy any ASROCK mobo.

Doesn't sound like you are much of a gamer, but the motherboards you are looking at are gaming motherboards. Are you sure you even need to upgrade?

My reccomendation:

If you really need to upgrade get a MOBO with 1 IDE slot, plug in 1 hdd as the master and 1 CD/DVD burner as the slave. You can then buy a SATA drive for windows and still be able to use 1 of your older hard drives. If you want another burner get a SATA one (make sure it's compatible with your motherboard, it should be but just check to be sure).

Plenty of older motherboards with 2 IDE slots, do a power search on newegg. Doesn't sound like you need the latest and greatest anyway.

I haven't used WD Raptors but you are right about the speed deal, my Maxtor on 150 Mbps on a ASROCK 775 DUAL VSTA is shown as transferring at 20 Mbps by Vista!!!

Want more PCI slots?

Get this then - converts 1 PCI to 2 X PCI slots

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.asp [...] I&doy=1m12

Wow do I feel a little berated.
Thanks ByDesign for at least complementing my attempt at organizing my thoughts.

And I'm not one of those ppl who buys new hardware for that warm fuzzy feeling or just to waste money :-) I still use my old work machine at work occasionally, it's a 550 MHz P3 and the inventory guy's always trying to haul it off. But frankly for the kind of work I do, it's a perfectly adequate little box. But some people just don't understand.

I do game, a good bit usually though my time has been pushed to the hilt for the last year and a half by working full time and going to school full time. I expect to have a good bit more free time starting in January for a few months at least and that coupled with Christmas being here is why I'm looking for a new system. :-)

And of course there's a reason I'm upgrading my sys: Oblivion.
It runs OK with the lowest settings on my Athlon XP2800+ and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, but the poor box is really pushed.

No I don't do a lot of online gaming.
I do a little private Warcraft 3 these days, but I generally put a lot of effort into trying to keep non-open source programs from talking back to a server owned by the co. that wrote them. (and yeah that makes patching Windows a pain) That pretty well rules out any of the cool MMORPGs like WoW and Battle.Net.
I never have liked the FPS style games and have no doubt Nib would make toast of me in Unreal in seconds!

shark, Nib, and ByDesign make some good points.
I've got some reason for wanting all my old hardware to keep working.
Part of is that I generally paid good money for it and it works as well now as it ever has and swapping components between systems has been a butt-saver a number of times.

I really don't get that much of an advantage out of a PCI NIC.
My main concern has always been that I don't want a permanent globally unique ID# like the MAC address on my mobo getting associated with me.
Yeah, it shouldn't go past the first router up the chain or whatever, but it's always seemed like a good policy. And it was always covenant to not have to re-config a NIC when I got home. But of cos 2 on-board NICs fix that.

Yah Nib, I've heard of Raptor :-)
I know that line of drives isn't suited to me and have never done the research to see if any of them can actually max out an ATA/133 connection.
I'd still be surprised if even they did. (Do they?)
I've never been sold on the fast HDD making a difference.
I've got a good selection of drives in service and there's been a good variety of them used as system drives too. And personally I've never noticed a difference.
Seems like boot time should show the biggest gain, but I don't reboot all that often.
And what's the % performance diff between the slowest HD and the fastest? 100% maybe? As quickly as even my games load I wouldn't mind waiting twice as long. I just timed Oblivion. It started in 5 seconds. If it took 2.5 secs to load or 10 that wouldn't make a difference to me personally. Still way better than waiting on a console game to boot. The wait time for Guitar Hero 2 jig's to load is just amazingly long. Like 20-30 secs every time maybe? And you have to sit through that every 5 minutes!
And of cos if you've gotta lotta RAM you shouldn't be doing much w/ the HD after a games loaded; I mean yeah new content probably comes off of it as you go and saving the game and all, but if there's only a few sec diff on loading the whole game, how much diff could there be in like a scene change?

Anyway, I can really tell the difference in big hard drives and I know Raptors are 10k RPM drives focused on speed, not size.
And I know I always run out. And yah Nib, by coincidence I do have a 500 GB drive. I almost finished filling it up last night as a matter of fact! :-)

About "teaming", ah they share a MAC. That makes way more sense now.

Soundcards. I really like my Sound Blaster one.
I like the Creative Labs software. The speaker calibration and the "What U Hear" "recording channel" or whatever it is has worked really well for me.
I do have one of the nice overpriced Klipshe speaker setups (I actually have each of the satellites positioned each about a foot above and diagonal from my head in the 4 corners! With games that support 4+ channels (woo hoo! The return of quadraphonix from the 70s!) it's really nice! I actually have some clue where in a game the sound happened... sometimes anyway.)
I'll survive w/o my sound card and I want my PC to have on board sound so I have a backup and so when I move on to the next box I can carry my soundcard with me and still use this one as a spare box for LAN parties).

Ah the phone modem.
It's pretty rare that I use mine, but it's a backup I want in place.
I can dial into work with the VPN's down. And of course everyone knows there are some places in this world that have phone jacks but no DSL or cable modem service. Heck, I've still got one friend who can't get plain ol' cable tv!

I'm not really looking for cheap stuff; I've always felt like the mobo was something worth investing in. That's kinda why I'm bothering all you nice people for your advice :-)

shark, you've had probs w/ ASROCK?
Isn't that co. really closely affiliated w/ another very respected co?
Maybe I'm getting it mixed up w/ something else.
Everyone turns out dud hardware now and then.
I've got an ASUS board that's given me fits.
I'll definitely keep an eye out for other folks w/ ASROCK probs though.

zahid, Denny: Thanks for the mobo recommendations. I'll definitely be checking those out. Need to fig out what that 945 chipset on the Asus P5LD2 is missing.

And thanks for the headsup on the PCI splitter!
That's really cool. Didn't know they made those. It'd make mounting things in the case really interesting :-)

Any for anyone who actually read all or even most of this, wow, you're my literacy hero :-) Sorry to be so long winded, but it's about as short as I could fig out make it.

--Operaman

Wow do I feel a little berated.
Thanks ByDesign for at least complementing my attempt at organizing my thoughts.

And I'm not one of those ppl who buys new hardware for that warm fuzzy feeling or just to waste money :-) I still use my old work machine at work occasionally, it's a 550 MHz P3 and the inventory guy's always trying to haul it off. But frankly for the kind of work I do, it's a perfectly adequate little box. But some people just don't understand.

I do game, a good bit usually though my time has been pushed to the hilt for the last year and a half by working full time and going to school full time. I expect to have a good bit more free time starting in January for a few months at least and that coupled with Christmas being here is why I'm looking for a new system. :-)

And of course there's a reason I'm upgrading my sys: Oblivion.
It runs OK with the lowest settings on my Athlon XP2800+ and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, but the poor box is really pushed.

No I don't do a lot of online gaming.
I do a little private Warcraft 3 these days, but I generally put a lot of effort into trying to keep non-open source programs from talking back to a server owned by the co. that wrote them. (and yeah that makes patching Windows a pain) That pretty well rules out any of the cool MMORPGs like WoW and Battle.Net.
I never have liked the FPS style games and have no doubt Nib would make toast of me in Unreal in seconds!

shark, Nib, and ByDesign make some good points.
I've got some reason for wanting all my old hardware to keep working.
Part of is that I generally paid good money for it and it works as well now as it ever has and swapping components between systems has been a butt-saver a number of times.

I really don't get that much of an advantage out of a PCI NIC.
My main concern has always been that I don't want a permanent globally unique ID# like the MAC address on my mobo getting associated with me.
Yeah, it shouldn't go past the first router up the chain or whatever, but it's always seemed like a good policy. And it was always covenant to not have to re-config a NIC when I got home. But of cos 2 on-board NICs fix that.

Yah Nib, I've heard of Raptor :-)
I know that line of drives isn't suited to me and have never done the research to see if any of them can actually max out an ATA/133 connection.
I'd still be surprised if even they did. (Do they?)
I've never been sold on the fast HDD making a difference.
I've got a good selection of drives in service and there's been a good variety of them used as system drives too. And personally I've never noticed a difference.
Seems like boot time should show the biggest gain, but I don't reboot all that often.
And what's the % performance diff between the slowest HD and the fastest? 100% maybe? As quickly as even my games load I wouldn't mind waiting twice as long. I just timed Oblivion. It started in 5 seconds. If it took 2.5 secs to load or 10 that wouldn't make a difference to me personally. Still way better than waiting on a console game to boot. The wait time for Guitar Hero 2 jig's to load is just amazingly long. Like 20-30 secs every time maybe? And you have to sit through that every 5 minutes!
And of cos if you've gotta lotta RAM you shouldn't be doing much w/ the HD after a games loaded; I mean yeah new content probably comes off of it as you go and saving the game and all, but if there's only a few sec diff on loading the whole game, how much diff could there be in like a scene change?

Anyway, I can really tell the difference in big hard drives and I know Raptors are 10k RPM drives focused on speed, not size.
And I know I always run out. And yah Nib, by coincidence I do have a 500 GB drive. I almost finished filling it up last night as a matter of fact! :-)

About "teaming", ah they share a MAC. That makes way more sense now.

Soundcards. I really like my Sound Blaster one.
I like the Creative Labs software. The speaker calibration and the "What U Hear" "recording channel" or whatever it is has worked really well for me.
I do have one of the nice overpriced Klipshe speaker setups (I actually have each of the satellites positioned each about a foot above and diagonal from my head in the 4 corners! With games that support 4+ channels (woo hoo! The return of quadraphonix from the 70s!) it's really nice! I actually have some clue where in a game the sound happened... sometimes anyway.)
I'll survive w/o my sound card and I want my PC to have on board sound so I have a backup and so when I move on to the next box I can carry my soundcard with me and still use this one as a spare box for LAN parties).

Ah the phone modem.
It's pretty rare that I use mine, but it's a backup I want in place.
I can dial into work with the VPN's down. And of course everyone knows there are some places in this world that have phone jacks but no DSL or cable modem service. Heck, I've still got one friend who can't get plain ol' cable tv!

I'm not really looking for cheap stuff; I've always felt like the mobo was something worth investing in. That's kinda why I'm bothering all you nice people for your advice :-)

shark, you've had probs w/ ASROCK?
Isn't that co. really closely affiliated w/ another very respected co?
Maybe I'm getting it mixed up w/ something else.
Everyone turns out dud hardware now and then.
I've got an ASUS board that's given me fits.
I'll definitely keep an eye out for other folks w/ ASROCK probs though.

zahid, Denny: Thanks for the mobo recommendations. I'll definitely be checking those out. Need to fig out what that 945 chipset on the Asus P5LD2 is missing.

And thanks for the headsup on the PCI splitter!
That's really cool. Didn't know they made those. It'd make mounting things in the case really interesting :-)

Any for anyone who actually read all or even most of this, wow, you're my literacy hero :-) Sorry to be so long winded, but it's about as short as I could fig out make it.

--Operaman