[quote]Originally posted by Harkoliar:

Quote:

hmmm, buying new hard drives is not an alternative for me right now. im kinda tight on money and hopefully i will look into that ide controller card (hopefully it wont take too much of my resource and not that expensive either) i have 192 mb ram so i think that would be sufficient. thanks for the advice! [img]smile.gif[/img] if not, i guess its time so set aside the old maxtor hard disk (it only has 6.4 gigs). i still have a 20gig and a 30 gig for a drive space, but you are right, im frugal with money and like to use old parts (heck that 6.4 gigs hard disk was pretty expensive years ago [img]smile.gif[/img] )

Ummm, unfortunately it's not as simple as memory. When I say resources, I mean things like IRQ, DMA, etc. These are all equally finite numbers no matter how much memory or what type of computer. It sucks when you find out you don't have a free channel to run your device! For only six gigs, I'd ditch the HDD.

[ 12-30-2002, 03:32 PM: Message edited by: Sir Kenyth ]

Because CD-writer can read normal CD´s too of course, and sometimes even better because they have been built to be "exact", I think your best bet would be to dump your current CD-drive. I see no reason to have two of them.. unless you want to burn cd´s without copying them to hard drive first.

You have three IDE devices (hard disks) and one IDE CDROM. If you want to keep your existing devices, your only real option is SCSI.

Adaptec host adapters are expensive, but they're rock solid and they run under *any* operating system. Tekram is a good substitute, and costs much less.

I would suggest buying a big-ass HD and cramming all the stuff you have onto that one HD, removing the other HDs. Perhaps you can recoup some investment by selling the old HDs. That would free up two IDE slots for further upgrades.

BTW, I have an Adaptec 2930U SCSI adapter on my machine, my scanner, DVD player, and cd burner are all SCSI. I also have an busmastering IDE CDROM. Love the setup, I very rarely have buffer underruns (unless I use winblows, of course)

*pssst* nForce2!

yep! but another reason is i dont want to use my cdwriter as a cdplayer all the time, it might get worn out right away.

you are absoloutly right. i examined one up close yesterday and it looks great. the only thing that scared me away is the price tag. so ill keep it in mind in case there will be a time i will have a dvd, cdr, and a cdrom [img]smile.gif[/img]

*pssst* nForce2!</font>[/QUOTE]4 USB2, 2 Firewire, 2 ethernet - that mobo has everything. I want one. I will order one in the new year. Probly the Asus. But I said "most" which will still hold true for a while yet.

Tranfer every thing from the little 6.4 GIG HDD to one of the other drives and Retire the little drive then put in your CD-Writer End of problem

4 USB2, 2 Firewire, 2 ethernet - that mobo has everything. I want one. I will order one in the new year. Probly the Asus. But I said "most" which will still hold true for a while yet.</font>[/QUOTE]Oh, absolutely.

I expect the nForce2 to gain significant market share. Load one of the 333mhz FSB cpus on it, and you have enough horsepower to seriously embarrass Pentium IV cpus costing twice as much.

And I agree, the Asus offers significant bang-for-buck, at cdn$250 it's not that expensive at all...

that sounds like a dream come true.. whats the price tag with that? and im not familiar with nforce2 and firewire, can someone explain that to me here?

nForce2 is nVidia's new chipset for the Athlon XP processor, it can support up to 400mhz FSB speeds and has DualDDR memory.

The DualDDR is especially interesting, because it has twice the bandwidth and half the latency of PC800 RDRAM. (roughly 6gb/sec)

Reviewed at:
Tom's Hardware