I need to replace an aging mother board. I need a board that will take a 3.0-3.2 P4, 2 ATAPI DVD-RW's, 5 ATA 100/133 HDD's, and has an AGP slot. I'm having a problem finding a mobo that will take these five IDE drives. (I REALLY don't want to go to SATA drives.) Anyone have any thoughts or recommendations? Thanks.Doug

The 'standard' for motherboards is an IDE controller that can only handle two H/Drives. They put two controllers on each board: IDE 0, and IDE 1, so you will only find motherboards that can handle a max of 4 IDE/ATA drives. If you want to run 5 H/Drives you will probably need to look into some kind of add-on PCI Raid adaptor card, though I must confess that I'm not too 'up' on Raid arrays and their limitations! Most new motherboards will now offer a couple of SATA connectors that I believe will run in conjunction with your IDE drives, so you may HAVE to consider this if you want a lot of H/Drives in your system (you can get IDE - SATA interface adaptors so you can convert existing drives to run from the SATA ports).Perhaps some other kind person can explain the Raid system properly...but bottom line as far as standard IDE goes is that 4 drives total is your limit; don't forget....that includes your CD/DVD drives too!!

Perhaps I should have explained more. I'm trying to duplicate the arrangement I have now but with a newer board that will take a faster processor. I have eight devices running now on an old Abit TH7-IIR. There are two HDD's (master/slave) on IDE 0, two DVD-RW's on, IDE 1, and four (masters and slaves) HDD's running non-raid on the raid slots (IDE 3 and 4). All the HDD's are ATA. I wasn't aware, though, that there are ATA/SATA adapters and so that may be a big help if I have to go with a 2-IDE/2-SATA arrangement on the board. Thanks for the tip on those.Doug

Hi Doug,ASUS has a wide variety of boards which will suit your needs and they are usually very stable.Check out the list on this link for ASUS motherboards ==>http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/mbindex.htm#socket478I saw at least one board with 4 sata connections available and there are those which have built-in RAID as well.Good luck.John

Thanks John. It's looking like I'm going to have to either go with some ATA/SATA adapters or change the drives. I guess that's just the price to be paid for having a lot of out-dated stuff :-) .Dooug

ASUS and ABIT have my heart. I've always had much better luck with them. I try to stay away from AOPEN boards. Also, MSI has some nice stuff on the market, but after using MSI boards (at least 4 of them) in various computers (office, work, simulator) I have decided to go back to ABIT and I've been extremely happy with it. I'm using the Fata1ty board, but it doesn't have the setup you're looking for with the AGP and ATA slots. Keep in mind, you can always pick up a PCI ATA board to expand if your new board is insistant upon SATA drives.

Thanks Eric. I've always used ABIT boards and have never had a problem. I'm going to follow the suggestions about using the add-on PCI ATA expansion board. That will solve the problem for me. I'm just glad you guys are around to give some good advice. Doug

Not a problem Doug. Good luck with your new build!