raid ? - drive lettering?

[Centurion]

currently I have all the cables in use on my box -

master primary has a 5 partition drive
slave has a cdrw

secondary master has my linux drive -
slave has my cdrom

In the interest of having more connections for eide/ide devices - would a raid card allow me to use this raid card as the generic pluggin for all the stuff I need on a sporatic basis. Like the laptop drive when I need to update something - or the customers HD that needs work [ ghost his off ,back it up -]

I am trying to think of configurations here -

As before - I have thought of using the drive selector device - and just going with stand alone ide drives but the way things are - I am getting into too many to be effective or practical.

And as well - would the devices plugged into this raid controller - affect the configuration of the drive letters in the rest of the machine?
What is the hiearchy of this? - does the raid device come after all of the onboard ide devices - no matter what?

Thanks - C

[Centurion]

Maybe what I want to do is add an ide controller - or is there a difference between just an ide and a raid controller?

examples - Manhattan PCI ATA133 Controller Card
Supports Ultra ATA 133 hard drives
Bootable
Shares IRQs with most PCI cards
Dual channel Ultra ATA 133 supports four IDE drives
Supports IDE, PIO, Ultra DMA 33, Ultra DMA 66, Ultra DMA 133, DMA and Multi-Word DMA
Supported OS: DOS, Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT and Linux

I-Will IS150 Serial ATA RAID PCI Controller


Serial ATA Controller Dual Channel W/Raid
Serial ATA at 1.5Gbps (150MB/sec)
Dual independent DMA channels w/256 bytes FIFO per channel
PCI specification v2.2 compliant
Compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 specifications
Supports Windows® 98SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP and Linux


Thanks - C

[Xaotic]

Some RAID controllers will not support non RAID configurations, others will. On any 2K, 2K3, XP OS, you can change the drive letters through disk management, so that shouldn't end up being too much of a pain if it moves things initially.

[Centurion]

Thanks - I am trying to maybe use this device for an unintended use.

C :)

[fshanda]

Yea you need an IDE controller card. I guess you could use the raid card if it will let you.
I use 2 IDE controller cards in the studio. Very easy to setup.

[Centurion]

BTW - Thanks fshanda - I think I will grab an ide controller and play a little with it.

the Raid will what till I grab another 40 gigger drive to mate it up to. Then I'll not worry as much.