ATA PCI cards and bus traffic

[Hex]

Would adding a PCI ATA-100 card (and drive) to my system run the risk of creating a bottleneck at my PCI bus?

The system in question is used as an Digital Audio Workstation and has a Yamaha DS214 audio card (33 MHz PCI). Under no circumstances do I want to add hardware that would diminish its performance or compete for resources with it. While I'd like to add more drive capacity to the system, I'd rather have to do a drive swap than endanger the Yamaha's I/O, but of course, adding another drive with a PCI ATA card (and with no audio I/O penalty) would be even better.

Thanks,
Hex

[kenja]

The motherboard hard drive controller actually is on the PCI bus. If you diabled one (or both) channels of the motherboard controller in the BIOS settings, the interrupt(s), etc would become available. (Some things, like my Plextor 8/4/32 CD-RW, insist on being connected to the motherboard.)

I haven't noticed any "throughput" problems when using PCI to IDE adapters in addition to the on-board controller, but I don't have any objective facts on that.

[kenja]

[Update:] Device Manager calls out the motherboard IDE controller and the PCI slots as being on "PCI bus 0". Looking at block diagrams, the controller is shown as being separated from the PCI slots by the "Southbridge" chip of the chipset. Perhaps this is just a schematic representation. So, I'd have to say that my answer to your question is "I'm not sure". The idea of freeing up interrupts still applies, as Charles has stated in the Guide.

[Randy_tx]

In my experience, the ATA 100 Hard Drives do NOT deliver enough added speed to warrant the expense....esp if you are running @ less than 600 mhz.

------------------
Wore out my Ctrl/Alt/Del keys with Win ME

[hiredgoonz]

I added an ata-100 card to my system and haven't had any trouble with interrupts, conflicts or performance issues(I'm running a diamnnd mx400 sound card, dlink nic, 3com modem, 2 hds, 3 cdroms)

The only thing I've noticed is the computer takes about 20 seconds longer to boot, due to the card having to autodetect what's attached to it...there may be a way to turn that off and set it to not autodetect, but it doesn't bother me, so I haven't tried to figure it out...

[kenja]

I've had an IDE-RAID "mindset" lately; Randy_tx makes an excellent point. I just read this at StorageReview.com (written in January):
[Quote:]
"Remember, since ATA drives have yet to break sequential transfer rates greater than even 45 MB/sec that ATA-66 (and in many cases, even ATA-33) interfaces will run a drive with optimal performance. Our testbed remains equipped with a Promise Ultra66 controller."
[Unquote]


[This message has been edited by kenja (edited 02-08-2001).]

[rani]

IDE devices:
- 2 Hard drives
- CD-rom
- CD-RW
- LS-120

I tried to install and get to work a Promise Ultra ATA/100 controller card since I recently purchased the CD-RW, but I had some problems:

- My Plextor Manager 2000 CD-RW software would lock-up Win98se upon loading (I had to kill this app for Windows to finish loading the rest of the GUI). Then PM2000 would not work if I tried to use it.

- If I right-clicked on the CD-rom or CD-RW icons no menu would appear and the application would freeze (i.e., if I did this under explorer, Explorer would freeze... if I did this under My Computer then the same thing...). I was then required to kill the app which would appear as "not responding".

This happened with cd discs being and not being loaded in the trays.

Note that these CD drives were on the MOBO ide controller... only the hard
drives were connected to the external controller.

In fact, at some point I just connected the second HD I use for backup on the external controller. I left the first HD that has the OS and all the programs installed on the MOBO controller... same thing.

But if both HDs are connected to the MOBO ide, no problems (?)

I have tried all sorts of things with my ide devices.

Has anyone encountered any problems with these cards?

Anyone can help? (I uninstalled the card now, togther with drivers)