I have a raid Controller,but it does not support CD ROM drives.Is there a way to make Cd ROm work on it.

George Joseph

Nevver heard of anyone attempting to connect a CDROM to a raid controller. I thought raid was specifically designed to allow different combinations of harddrive mirroring. or making quasi large drives spanned across a number of physical disks. Connect the CDROM to a normal IDE controller or if there is no available controller on the motherboad then you will need another plug-in ide controller card.

I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

If you read the RAID Controllers documentation it will probably tell you not to connect a CD drive to it. Although some RAID controllers may take a CD Drive, it is likely to prove unreliable.

AS Richard says, there is no advantage in putting a CD drive on a RAID controller. Use one of the on-board IDE interfaces.

Stuart

But i dont have enough On board IDEs.

George Joseph

Does that mean all you on-board interface have CD/DVD drives on them?

If so, why do you want another.

If not take one of the hard disks of and put that on the RAID Controller and put the CD drive on the on board controller.

Stuart

I ran a simple test with a PCI Ultra ATA 133 RAID IDE contoller card.The OS is Windows 2000.The PCI card shown in Control Panel has the following chipset:Hardware/SCSI and RAID Controllers/Silicon Image SiI 0680 Ultra 133 Medley ATA Raid Controller.I connected the cdrw drive to the red port and a second data hard drive to the blue port.The C boot drive was left on the motherboard first IDE port.I connected the cable to the sound card,used 80 wires/40 pins data cable(normally supplied with the controller card,do not use the older 40 wires 40 pins cable)for both drives and installed the driver for the controller card for the card to work letting the update from cdrom look for the right *.inf file.I was able to read a cdr with data and music from cd without problems.The controller card I used is a fast one(recent one)and it is possible depending on configuration that older cards may be more difficult to configure.It is not necessary neither useful to enter the RAID configuration by pressing on a key indicated on the screen in the bootup sequence.Do not press any key when you start the computer.Leave it to the 2 bios(motherboard and extra RAI IDE controller) to find the Operating System and boot.These cards can be used as RAID(not needed here) but also as extra IDE ports as in the explained situation here.This is particularly useful to get that extra IDE drive to work when you have no more room from the 4 basic ones offered by the 2 IDE ports on the motherboard and that the motherboard has no SATA ports.I ran my test on an old Emachine Etower 400i(a 400 MHz computer).You will notice a somewhat slower response in the bootup sequence because the IDE RAID card has its own bios that will also load before the final steps leading to the Windows screens.Be patient.Good luck.

HI
i have only i parallel ATA post on the mother board...rest 4 are SATA.

I connected a CD Writer and DVD writer on the onboard connector.A harddisk on the RAID.

Now i need to connect a CD Drive and DVD Drive to the ecomputer.

George Joseph
www.geoshrad.co.nr

So what you are saying is that you have four Optical drives, A CD Writer, a DVD Writer, a CD-ROM drive and a DVD-ROM drive.

If that is the case then to be quite honest, that is silly. The DVD Writer alone will carry out all the functions of the other three drives. A DVD Writer and DVD-ROM should be enough for anyone.

Cant imagine what you would need four optical drives for.

Stuart

I ned to take copy on fly and simultanious writing on more than a single disks..What should i Do

www.geoshrad.co.nr

If you must have multiple optical drives your best bet would be to install a PCI IDE Controller card. You can get cards with two IDE interfaces, each of which will take two drives. Put the two writers as Primary Master and Secondary Master on the PCI card and the two ROM drives on the on-board interface. That way you will get the fastest transfer rate when writing multiple disks.

Stuart

CD-Rom can be connected to a RAID controller if the controller has the option to turn off RAID Mode. If it has, then it will work in IDE Mode or SATA Mode depending the type of controller.

90% of computer problems are located between the keyboard and the chair!