Heres the problem.

My asus p35 motherboard has 6 SATA ports. Unfortunately my gigantic 8800 ultra is blocking 4 of them. The remaining two are both Master ports, and my HDD is connected to one of them. My current DVDrom is an old IDE drive.

I wish to get a dvd writer and as they are of the SATA variety Iwas wondering if there'll be any problem if I hook it upto the SATA master port? And if its gonna be a major issue.

Thanks in Advance.
scurv

I do not know exactly what Asus does, but since each SATA port only handles one device, there really isn't a "master" device. Plug it in and use the BIOS to select the boot device.

Some SATA cables have right angle connectors. My Gigabyte board came with some. The right angled end on mine gives nearly a 1/2" extra clearance (1 cm.) compared to the straight end.

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by a "master" port? Obviously SATA isn't like PATA which had a master and slave port for each connector, since it supports only one device per connector. So, to what other technical feature are you referring? I am interested because I happen to have a SATA BD/DVD drive that I plan to connect up soon to a SATA port, and I wasn't aware that SATA ports had differences beyond those caused by the controllers to which they connect.

The P35 chipset supports up to 6 SATA ports directly with no secondary I/O controller chip. So it isn't clear to me how the two accessible ports on your board are different from the other four? Did Asus do something funny and put two ports on a separate I/O controller?

you can put it anywhere, I have mine as boot device on sata, there really is no master as others have said. One thing, if you run it in AHCI mode, you need to install the raid drivers during xp setup, or it will bluescreen you cannot do it later.

You can also use vista which has it built in, personally I use ide mode because there is no performance advantage and no driver problems

According to the manual for my Asus p5ke,
SATA 1,2,5,6 are red and the setting 'Master' and used for 'Boot disk'
SATA 3,4 are black colored and setting is 'Slave' and used for 'Data disk'

hope that helps.

Strange. You could always see if you can boot from a black connector.

Would right angled SATA connectors give you access to the blocked SATA ports?