my motherboard only has serial ports so i'm planning to use a pci slot to connect my samsung SH-S182D dvd burner. can i just get any pci card with a parallel port? just any parallel ata cables? do these things have specific names and are there any considerations i should be aware of when choosing them? is this setup likely to slow down drive performance or cause complications? would it just be better to get a serial ide drive? are there any widely used and popular such drives? (preferably cheaper ones like my nec 3550a or the samsung)
Features: Dual IDE ports support separate timing and optimum speeds of attached drive(s) or ATAPI device(s) Includes single Ultra ATA 80-wire/40-pin cable; cable required for Ultra ATA/133 drives to reduce signal noise (?crosstalk?) during transfers Bus mastering offloads data I/O handling from host CPU; supports CRC error-checking of UDMA drives Recognizes drive capacities exceeding 137GB
this controller is out of stock. what's the difference between the $10-$15 ide cards and the $30-$50 ones. based on the reviews, price seems to be rather independent of quality. are there different features among non-raid cards that i need to know about?
Quote:More expensive, the better it is. Sounds logical.
the reviews i've seen don't seem to support this view. i guess you were joking.
Quote:Only use RAID cards, if your mobo supports it.
i thought raid controllers were only for configuring hard drives in raid array. do they all support optical ide devices as well? what's superior about raid cards for my purposes?
