what do you mean exactly by spamming sound cards?

because an additional pata controller which now should be cheap is not an option? also You can take multiport sata and use pata<>sata convertrs

Not my thing; lots of sound cards but they're in there for, you know, sound. 😀

I like the minimalism of one HDD/CF and one optical drive, and a regular dual channel controller can handle two of each plus FDD's. Floppies are separate from IDE and most all headers take two FDD's.

My quad speed CD-ROM has a proprietary interface, so for that one I need my SB Pro or GUS MAX.

I also have never used the IDE/custom headers of a soundcard - ever...

I've used my IDE connector on my SB AWE32 one time, and that's to connect my ATAPI CD drive because my 486 decided to stop being reasonable and demanded I do that.

You can use IDE controllers for that man. I have a PCI one from Promise that has 4 IDE connectors on the one card. I mean you can't run out of drives then.

... i remember there was stuff that called 'daisy-chain' HDD ...

Joey_sw wrote:

... i remember there was stuff that called 'daisy-chain' HDD ...

Some drive interfaces allow daisy chaining. One example is the Commodore serial interface found on VIC-20/C64/C128 machines, plus a few others. You could daisy chain about up to 4 drives, but this required physically opening the drive, and cutting/soldering links to change the drive IDs, unless you had the newer drive.

Other systems like the Macintosh and Amiga also had daisy chain capability, and most notably, Firewire was famous for it's daisy chaining abilities, which are now present in Thunderbolt.

Unfortunately, IDE based PATA does not support any sort of daisy chaining, unless you wish to count the two drives per cable deal. If you need daisy chaining for drives on a PC, you need firewire.

harddrivespin wrote:

I know it's a sin

Why is this to you a sin?
Provided that it works for you, why would it even be considered a problem?

But anyway, I never have, but did consider it a couple times. But I always ended up using the onboard controller (my 486 PCI board didn't need a dedicated controller) and I'd typically build a rig with like 1 optical drive and 1 harddrive. The only reasons I'd need more is if I (for whatever reason) would want to include 2 optical drives (which I find very handy when doing stuff like comparing optical disks or using 1 audio CD along with the ability to browse disks) or use a ZIP drive/LS-120 drive or something.

My main reason to not use any of my really very slow CDROM drives (like my 2x CDROM drive) is due to their general inability to (reliably) read written media. I don't even know if I have any of those proprietary CDROM drives that are supported by many of the sound cards of that era.

I had a CF card attached to a single channel 16-bit ISA controller once, and the controller did not like having the CD drive on the same cable. When using a real platter drive (600mb), there was no problem. I solved it by attaching the optical drive to a Creative SB16 with IDE channel. And I had the exact same issue with a single channel goldstar VLB controller as well. Solved it by lowering the speed on the VLB controller. Anyway... To make it short. Yes I have tried it. A couple of times in order to check it out how it works, and a couple of times because I needed o do it.

My first P120 system shipped with the CD ROM attached to the SB16, only ever used Win 3.1 and then Win95 on this machine and never had any problems. I have built all my subsequent systems and always used the onboard IDE.

Recently I have rebuilt a similar P133 system and planned to run the optical drive off the SB16 to leave the secondary channel free for an IDE to flash memory (CF or SD) reader mounted to a slot bracket for removable storage. However I ran into some problems:
- I couldn't find a driver the for SB16 IDE that would work in Win98 or NT4 onwards; and
- It turned out my eBay SB16 is broken (OPL/FM audio is distorted to the point of being almost inaudible). I am now using an Audician 32 which doesn't have an IDE interface, so my plans are abandoned.

Based on the driver problems, think this is only a viable option for DOS machines and best used for optical drives. Not sure how standard the IDE interfaces are for non-soundblaster cards.

Ampera wrote:

Some drive interfaces allow daisy chaining. One example is the Commodore serial interface found on VIC-20/C64/C128 machines, plu […]
Show full quote

Joey_sw wrote:

... i remember there was stuff that called 'daisy-chain' HDD ...

Some drive interfaces allow daisy chaining. One example is the Commodore serial interface found on VIC-20/C64/C128 machines, plus a few others. You could daisy chain about up to 4 drives, but this required physically opening the drive, and cutting/soldering links to change the drive IDs, unless you had the newer drive.

Other systems like the Macintosh and Amiga also had daisy chain capability, and most notably, Firewire was famous for it's daisy chaining abilities, which are now present in Thunderbolt.

Unfortunately, IDE based PATA does not support any sort of daisy chaining, unless you wish to count the two drives per cable deal. If you need daisy chaining for drives on a PC, you need firewire.

Or SCSI.

Dammit, I forgot SCSI.

Whatever, if I tried to mention every single interface that could daisy chain, I'd be here all day.

Less famous was the Panasonic / MKE interface supported daisy chaining, not that their was much need for multiple CD drives in a system back then.

Only reason its not common is I don't think many people need more then 4 IDE drives in a single system.
My 486 has on-board IDE but only 1 channel, HDD1 is a spindle drive for authentic startup sound, HDD2 is CF card with all my games. CD is off the back of the Soundcard.