ok, i'll start off explaining my problem and then my idea, but since i don't know how it will work i need some help, i've googled it but haven't found what i'm looking for.

My Super S2DGU motherboard has ATA/33, and i don't like that, so i want to use SCSI for my master HDD that boots windows and installs programs and whatnot.

1) how would i go about installing windows on a SCSI hard drive?
2) how can i add IDE hard drives without interference of master drives?

i saw some IDE to USB cables, and thought about getting a USB 2.0 card with internal ports and taking that route, but im not sure about it all. i know its possible and all, but i wanted to ask.

the soundcard is ISA, the graphics card is AGP, the ethernet card is PCI. i have 3 available PCI slots to get the job done.

any help is greatly appreciated. i wont be able to actually do anything until i get the PSU and case for it, but it always helps to know things in advance.

my case and PSU are already picked out, its just a matter of finding out if an order can be altered or not to save me some money.

It would be better if you first go and find your PSU...

You would see that there is an option "Boot from SCSI" in your BIOS. The onboard SCSI controller is most likely seen by XP so you don’t need extra driver disks in combination with F6 when you install XP.

So, that problem is solved. For just a few bucks you can buy SATA or PATA add-on cards. I won’t use the USB 1.1 ports for USB to IDE if I was you .

i was thinking of running them to a USB 2.0 card with an internal port, routing a hub internally, and having them all go into the hub, then into the USB 2.0 [slightly complicated, but it would solve the speed issue by a longshot] [i may just do that for kicks too]

but alright, that clears that up.

once i get past the booting off SCSI, i can just stack the hard drives on the IDE doing just master/slave and they'd just appear as more drives no?

i wouldn't want to boot off 33mb/s..i can live with 80 though.

"once i get past the booting off SCSI, i can just stack the hard drives on the IDE doing just master/slave and they'd just appear as more drives no?"

Yes, you are right about that.

But that USB to IDE, naaa , forget about it, spending more money on that then a PATA ad-on card. There are also cards with VIA chipset that have one PATA port and 2 SATA ports, they are cheap, like 15 US$ and work well.

Don't go for IDE-USB adapters. you are asking for a world of pain...

Just grab yourself a SATA PCI card, and if you must use PATA drives get some PATA converters, they work great for HDDs... hell, the first few WD raptors had a SATA to PATA built into the drive, they were PATA drives at heart.

how am i asking for a world of pain? i've got it all mapped out...the only reason i'm not going SATA is because once i do, i'll have a bunch of adapters left over when i go all out, and the adapters wont be worth much of anything. also, if i boot SCSI, and have two internals go USB, i'll have faster transfer rate, and i wont have to worry about jumpers, or SATA setting or installing. it does sound like a lot to work out, and it may end up being a little pricey, but i'd rather have it...

its just the same when you argue onboard graphics and a graphics card...its user preference.

SATA and jumpers? bonestonne, let me tell you something, you don’t have jumpers with SATA, not even on the add-on cards. But go ahead if you like to spend speed (60MB/s MAX! theoretically) and money on a slower system ...

the system is 8 years old either way, so speed isn't exactly its middle name.

also, this system may run linux actually, now that i found an OSS linux audio editing program.

we'll see when i get case/PSU, because i'll be making a video of the build.

USB PATA adapters have serious issues with data lag and reliability, for one. At least the ones i have tried on various chipsets. I got so sick of it I went from usb2 to ieee1394. World of difference.

well, my only problem is that if i don't go USB, i'll have booting issues if i do use linux, like i've had in the past, multiple IDE drives crash my computer, this going into an endless reboot cycle because it fails to load several things properly [this was before i knew enough about computers so i never took notice as to what].

i'll probably end up dual booting windows/linux and having windows just because it wouldn't be that bad...if i had a high enough capacity SCSI drive i'd triple boot with darwin, but eh...i don't think 9 gigs is enough for that, even if windows and linux are really small. i'll have to test it sometime.

Replace your PSU with one that can handle the load. this is a telltale sign of an overloaded PSU.

i've used two HDD's in this computer for a long time with no problem. its not an issue of power, its an issue of linux. linux doesn't like NTFS partitioned slave drives, which is what my slave was partitioned as, and what most of my drives are. if it was a FAT16 or 32 format, there would be no problem.

If it is an issue with the slave hack, why use slaves at all?
I haven't had a drive as slave in a computer since 1999 or so. Master/slave is a horrid hack that never should have been implemented IMHO.

Besides, PCI PATA controllers are cheap as dirt now anyways. I got a couple sil0680 based ones myself just laying around incase I need them.

when i used a slave, i had two 40GB hard drives. i have 17.8 gigs of music. if it was all on the master, i'd have little room left for adobe audition.

i'm a DJ, and i edit/record music.

You don't seem to understand.
most motherboards (even old ones) come with 2 PATA channels, some come with 4. Each one of those can take a master and slave drive. I simply never put a slave on any. When I need more drives in a system then there are channels, I add more with PCI cards, one channel per drive I use. A lot of the time I don't even have hard drives hooked to the included motherboard channels because the add in cards don't usually support booting from anything but the hard drives on them but the system BIOS does for the PATA channels that are on the motherboard.

I have had systems with two PATA cards in them and four PATA channels on the motherboard. That gave me a total of eight PATA channels to work with, and I had eight drives (optical, zip, and 6 hard drives) in the system.

Here you go, this is the one I use.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816124001

The only thing is you may have to get UNIFLASH and find an old version of the card BIOS is your motherboard is quirky with it. I had to do this to one of them, if you need the BIOS for one or help flashing it (if you decide to get one or three) I will be glad to help.

yes, i understand what you're saying, but if the drives are going through USB, they'll be recognized as external, and i'd even be able to unplug them if i wanted at any time. the big thing about going PATA is that its 33mb/s. even though i may go with linux for it, i don't want it to be that slow. if i get USB2.0 for it, i'll be rockin' out with 480mb/s. thats a significant jump. also, i want to reserve the PATA connectors on the motherboard for optical drives, not waste them on HDDs that may force me into an endless reboot cycle because they're all formatted NTFS except the ones that don't work etc.

its not that i'm trying to make it complicated, its that i'm trying to completely resolve a few issues before they start. also, i dont want a PCI IDE/PATA controller because i don't want cables stretching all around the case. its a SUPER S2DGU, with 2 intel PII Xeon processors, they aren't the smallest processors to hit the face of the earth.

i plan on having 3 optical drives, 1 SCSI drive and 2 PATA drives. 3 optical drives will max out the PATA connectors giving me room for one slave drive if i wanted. i'm not trying to bash anyone or say they're wrong, but for my usage, PATA isn't the best of ideas with this board for HDD's. i use Adobe Audition for music editing, luckily i have an 80GB PATA at the moment. my /temp folder is about 46GB, and thats reserved for adobe auditions editing. the larger the temp folder, the longer the program can go before crashing. i've run on as little as 4 GB /temp folder, and gotten 15 minutes of recording, then it crashes. i'll use a 9GB SCSI drive to boot off of, that solves the 33mb/s issue, as it'll be 80mb/s. if i use USB for the other HDDs, one will be a 40gb, specifically for the /temp folder, and the 80GB i'm running now, for saving music onto. having the faster drives will help me because it'll take some off the processor. its not hard to realize that 33mb/s is extremely bottlenecked for an OS, and if you're recording something, you don't want a slow access time to your /temp folder, that acts as a buffer for the recording. as much as i would like to go SATA, i'd rather not, i'm used to PATA, i don't want to get into anything else.

it may seem a little stupid to some, but i have it worked out for what i'll be doing, and how i need it. i'm not going to say anyone is wrong about anything, because all other methods will work, but the other methods are out of my reach. i get the case and PSU for christmas, a combined total of about $90+, and thats about all i can really ask for, the USB and whatnot will be from my sisters, because as cheap as it is to get IDE controllers that are PCI based, i'm no big fan of ribbon cables all over, as you can tell if you look at the picture of my current computer. it may be a big case, but the size of the processors take away from some room that most people do have. the size of the two processors on the board is about equal to a PSU, so i'm contouring the setup with space and speed.

Where the hell did you hear that? it is 133MB/s (megabytes per second). Even the fastest HDDs cannot transfer data that fast off-platter.
Uhm, no. It is 60MB/s (60Megabytes per second, or 480Megabits per second) And that is per controller. Most controllers are (were last I looked into it) chained together and not in parallel, so that means 60MB/s total between every USB2 device you have. In addition to this, USB tends to not be able to perform at that rate and a more realistic speed is 40MB/s.

I already told you of the way to work around that, and I told you the ones on the motherboard need not be the ones the hard drive(s) is(are) hooked to.
The PATA cables are somehow going to be more bulk then USB cables, converters, power for the converters, and cable to the HDD from the converters?

First, faster drives do not reduce CPU load. As for all the speeds, look up as PATA is *NOT* 33MB/s.

Ribbon cables? who needs ribbon cables for PATA? http://www.pctoys.com/840556017325.html
I also do have a dual slot 1 system, so I know exactly what you are dealing with with the dual xeon system (I have worked with xeons as well, they are taller but beyond that the same basic size and shape two slot 1 P3s)

One of my main points is that most of your information is either severely out of date or just wrong. Please, for your own sake, do some additional looking! Not doing so will only hurt you in the end.

Here is my dual P3. You'll notice I put it in the smallest case I have where the PSU hangs over the dual P3 CPUs. I did this for two main reasons: 1. to prove that a dual CPU machine need not take much space and can still be neat, 2. because I wanted to have my server take as little space as possible.

There is only one drive in it in this picture, but I have three PATA drives in it now, and a zip drive and floppy. It is just as neat now as it is in that picture.

His motherboard doesn't support UDMA-6! From the sounds of it, it's UDMA-2 (max transfer speed of 33MB/s). There are different levels of transfer speed over PATA, you know...

@bonnestone - Now that that's been said, I think I might be able to clear up some confusion. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you dont' want to get a PATA PCI card because you think that it'll only run at 33MB/s, right? The PATA card has it's own controller, and therefore will be able to run at whatever its rated maximum is (which is in all likelyhood, UDMA6, or 133MB/s). This will ultimately be faster than the USB solution, since the maximum theoretical transfer speed of USB2 is 480mbps, or 60MB/s.

However... data transfer over USB2 isn't very efficient. Have a look at USB external hard drive benchmarks. Here's one for example. The maximum transfer rate of the system over USB2.0 is only 25MB/s for a sequential write - that's on a 7200RPM Seagate!!!. The same drive connected through PATA is at least 35MB/s. There's also the problem of the overhead in USB communication - it's really not the greatest standard if you want performance.


Also - if the drives are going to be inside the case, why on this earth would you want to open it up and remove them...Unless I'm missing something - this is a very bad idea. I've dealt with a LOT of computer systems, and unless I would NEVER unplug anything from a computer while it's on, unless it's from an external USB port and the case is closed.



In the end, I think you're getting confused with MB/s and mbps. I too would recommend that you get a PATA PCI card and run your extra drives off it. If the fact that the drives are NTFS formatted is a problem when booting linux, make them FAT32, or ext3 if you're running Linux all the time. There are ext3 drivers for Windows as well, that work quite well - see here.

I know this very, very well. this is one of the big reasons I reccommended him to run his HDDs off of the PCI PATA controller and his opticals off of the onboard. This is the EXACT same situation my dual P3 server that is pictured is in, so I have a bit of an inside view of his situation.

He's talking about his onboard, you're talking about the card. That's why he said 33MB/s. No need to blow up at him ("Where the hell did you hear that? ")

...oh. Sorry for that, bonestonne.

i'll test something i have over the next few days, and get back to people on this...i see where everyone is coming from, and all the stuff about it. i wanted to avoid having a PCI IDE controller, the one i have now has serious issues, i wanted to avoid that again. if i can get my PCI ATA/66 controller working, if it still works for installation i'll see what i can conjure up. left or right, i'll be getting the IDE to USB cables for data recovery [theres an extremely old computer that i need to take a look at in my room, and also the power adapters might be handy, i'm also getting a USB2.0 PCI card, because i'll need it, especially if i use the computer as my main.

we'll see how it all works. i had the idea because in theory it should have no problems when it comes to accessing/using the drives.

[no agression intended]

i ordered my case, PSU, USB2 card, and a new VGA cable today, should all be here by friday...

i have a question about the PCI card, but since its all for the new computer, i didn't feel like creating a new topic.

Picture of USB card

it has the holes on the chipset 1-10, which i'm guessing would be where pins are soldiered on for a USB2.0 hub on the front of a case or something

first, am i right about that? its only a guess, but that is what it technically would be right?

and second, would it be safe to try to soldier pins in there so i could utilize the front bay of the case? the motherboard being so old doesn't have the pins for USB on it, and i want to get as much out of it as possible.

it totally depends on the circuitry. Without knowing that exact card or usb2 chip it is tough to say.

Also, forum rules prohibit such a large image, and besides that hotlinking images is a big no-no.

It has uses the same lanes as the USB connector next to it, so if you solder there DO NOT use that connector next to it.

that is actually only one port, PuntoMX, the pin array holes are two ports. There is a good chance the second port is one of the four in the back, this is why I said what I said above. it is not a good idea until more information is found out about how the card and chip are wired.

Indeed, forgot that it was only one port... my fault.

But it’s easy to see how the circuit goes; each port has 2 lines coming from the chip, you should be able to see what ports/pins are used.

The card I have right now in my hand has 4 eternal ports and one place for one internal port or pin-line.

ok, well, it should get here on thursday, which is the day i'm going to at least get it all together and in one piece, i'll bring it into school and then make a video of my build, and then submit it. i'm still trying to figure out what to boot. my thoughts are an nLited XP, and maybe dual boot with Edubuntu 6.06, but i'll have to master Ardour before then.

i don't think its new enough to support Darwin 7.2.1, so i've ruled that out.

but as for the USB, am i right in thinking [from what you've all said] that if i did soldier pins on, one port wouldn't work?