Forget IDE. If you are using those drives to boot from they are holding you back. I'd invest in a pair of SSD drives. makes the WORLD of difference. Also if you need a floppy drive, get a USB one. Its what I use. I found THREE over the span of a month at thrift stores. paid like $5 for each one.

Also any time you see, "faital1ty" you are paying 10% more for some red coloring. Thats it.

This would be a good board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16813131791

And if you are hell-bent on having IDE then get a few of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-IDE-100133-HDD-C … =item2c58ad7a6d

the core series of intel processors was the death knell for IDE. Just like P4 was to isa.

And to put things into perspective, I paid $500 for my motherboard. FYI.

Z68 doesn't even have native PCI support, they use an "external companion bridge-chip" to offer it in the boards that have pci slots... ide/fdc have been ditched as well, your only bet is to get a mobo with pci slots and use there some ide/fdc controller...
I have a 2600K/P8Z68V combo ... I miss fdc but a usb floppy solved that... for ide I can't say I really care 😁

luckybob wrote:

Forget IDE. If you are using those drives to boot from they are holding you back. I'd invest in a pair of SSD drives. makes t […]
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Forget IDE. If you are using those drives to boot from they are holding you back. I'd invest in a pair of SSD drives. makes the WORLD of difference. Also if you need a floppy drive, get a USB one. Its what I use. I found THREE over the span of a month at thrift stores. paid like $5 for each one.

Also any time you see, "faital1ty" you are paying 10% more for some red coloring. Thats it.

This would be a good board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16813131791

And if you are hell-bent on having IDE then get a few of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-IDE-100133-HDD-C … =item2c58ad7a6d

the core series of intel processors was the death knell for IDE. Just like P4 was to isa.

And to put things into perspective, I paid $500 for my motherboard. FYI.

500 dollars, for a motherboard? I've never, ever spent that much on one - and I have a history of buying top end smp workstation boards, years before they became mainstream. That's a crazy amount of money to pay.

I've been told that pci floppy drive controllers don't exist.

And if you dont want to use one of those cheap chinese adapters, a pci-e => ide adapter would be your next option: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16815158084

usb floppy drives will set you back a MASSIVE $11 http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1292111011

megatron-uk wrote:

500 dollars, for a motherboard? I've never, ever spent that much on one - and I have a history of buying top end smp workstation boards, years before they became mainstream. That's a crazy amount of money to pay.

http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/O … x0/H8DA6_-F.cfm

^.^

It was like $450 but after tax and shipping it was 5 bills. It was a deal because they are over $500 now.

Are there any USB to floppy adaptor? I mean some kind of adaptor that have a USB connector in one side and a 34 pin FDC connector on the other side.

I have a HxC floppy emulator with a SD full of floppy images, so it would be very useful.

I just live without a floppy controller at the moment but would like one to. Currently my thought is to get an LS-120 drive and attach it to a Sata to IDE converter and hope it works I just need an LS-120 drive first. I could got the USB route but I want an internal drive and I need to be able to read 720KB disks not just 1440KB disks

I have a USB floppy drive and it works quite well. Booting from it works just fine.

PCI IDE controllers are also readily available, so one just needs to find a board with PCI slots which shouldn't be hard.

And then there are also USB to IDE adapters for HDDs. Not sure if there are any USB 3 versions yet, but I believe it's just a matter of time.

Not to mention IDE <> SATA adapter.

Floppy > USB: Well the chips certainly exist. But the market is too small to have such a product and it's not like a ready made USB floppy drive is that expensive anyway...

Thanks for your suggestions.

I just want IDE for the DVD reader unit and burner but I could get two SATA drives easily.

Floppy drive could be USB if it works properly as you say.

What about the chipset. Is Z68 a good option? Any thoughts?

PS - $ 500 for a mainboard seem a bit steep to me. I have just 600 € saved...

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just get new burners that use SATA or find an IDE pci card in that case?

For floppy, a USB one should be fine. It'll boot just as most USB storage devices and typically, a USB drive will even copy and read a little faster than drives using traditional floppy interface.

the z68 was designed for sandybridge cpus, so getting one for the 2600K is a no-brainer 😁
just get some good ram with it, I have 4x4gb Corsair vengeance modules and they work great, cheaper ram might give you probs so be warned

USB floppy drives work quite well and are usually bootable on modern computers. Performance however seems a little sluggish with my Sony MPF82E-U1

I bought one of these a while ago:

http://www.gadgetell.com/technologytell/artic … oppy-drive-key/

Works very well. It's a life saver when you have to install Windows 2003 on a server without a floppy drive.

It's expensive, but it's been very useful for me. When you plug it on a computer, Windows will detect two different devices.

One of them is a USB floppy drive (1.44 MB)

And the other is a regular USB flash drive.

The stick also has a small plastic switch on its side. The switch simply changes the order of the devices (floppy first, or flash drive first).

The switch is needed because some motherboards can only boot from the first device.