Hello, wanted to see if anyone could help me with the following scenario: - I have a brand new ECS Motherboard - I have connected 2 SATA devices: 1x 500 GB HD (C:), 1x Samsung DVD Burner I would like to add 2 IDE devices: 1x 250 GB Seagate HD (previosuly used as C:), 1x NEC 3500-A DVD Burner Here my questions: - Do they need to be configured master, slave, or cable direct (I read that 40p IDE cables do not support cable direct)? - If they need to be master or slave, should they be master by type (SATA HD master, IDE HD slave), by cable (IDE HD master, IDE DVD Burner slave), or none at all if they are set to cable select? - IDE ribbon cable - does it matter which connector (center or end) goes into which device? Should e.g. the IDE HD be connected to the end or vice versa? THANKS FOR YOUR HELP IN ADVANCE!

You need to get an 80 wire IDE cable. The burner won't work properly on the 40 wire cable. SATA and IDE are totally separate so don't worry about the SATA at all. Some motherboards DO have some SATA ports that you can boot from and some that you can't. Read the manual to verify if that is something to be concerned with in your case. You probably only have ONE IDE channel but to answer your IDE question, Master/slave settings apply to each IDE controller/cable. Separate IDE controllers stand on their own. I recommend using Master/slave IDE settings. When using Master/slave settings it doesn't matter which connector you use for either drive. Use which ever one works best for cable routing.

Thanks, OtheHill. I have 3 80 wire IDE cables and assume one of those will work. So SATA runs completely separate from IDE, right? I do only have one IDE channel for 2 IDE devices max., so how should they be configured assuming they are on the same cable? IDE DVD Burner - master or slave? Also, end of cable or center connector? IDE HD - master or slave? Also, end of cable or center connector? Thanks!

SAT is separate. If you plan on booting to the hard drive then make it the Master, otherwise it makes no difference. Modern controllers allow each drive to run at whatever speed they can. So the hard drive and the burner may each run at different DMA modes. As I stated above, you can connect the Master to either of the connectors, same goes for the slave. Do it whatever way the cable works best. If your IDE hard drive happens to be a Western Digital drive make sure you use the jumper setting for Master with slave if making it the master.

Thanks again. I don't plan on booting from the IDE HD, it is my "old" HD, and I want it to be a secondary HD to a) transfer files and b) for future file-back-up since i am booting from the SATA HD, my C:. The IDE DVD burner is just there to have another drive if needed. My main concern is that I do not want my PC getting confused about having a SATA HD and a master IDE HD. I have run into problems in the past where it did not recognize which is which making Windows XP installations a nightmare.

In the BIOS you must select Which hard drive to boot to. When all that was available were IDE drives the selection was just IDE 0 or IDE 1. Now there are more options. I may be called advance boot options. Going by memory here as I can't take the time to boot to my BIOS right now. One other thing to note. You need to read the manual concerning how to setup the SATA drive. There are a couple of options. There is an IDE compatibility mode, which may be called something else. Then there is straight SATA. If you wish to get slightly better SATA burst speeds if using a SATA II drive, you need to install the SATA controller drivers when you first start to install WinXP. If using Vista I don't think that is necessary, although I am not sure as I don't use Vista. If you don't have a floppy drive and you want to install the SATA drivers you will need to slipstream them into your WinXP CD. I might add that in the real world this makes little performance difference so you may not elect to bother with all that. Slipstreaming is worthwhile if you need to install many service packs. If your WinXP CD is the ORIGINAL (no service packs) you will either need to slipstream or paratition the drive into something with a primary partition smaller than 127GB. I alway recommend partitioning into multiple partitions, even if not necessary as described above. For further help with partitioning and the issue with partition size look at the two links below. http://partition.radified.com/ http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm

Thanks, OtheHill. Everything works fine now, the IDE HD is set to Master but it looks like my PC is recognizing the SATA drive as the Master since I changed the properties in setup/BIOS.