max ide connections?

sparkicks1

normally in the mobo theres the hdd, floppy, and disks and i was under the impression that you could only have 3 ide slots ( probally using the wrong termanology but hopefully you understand what i mean anyway)
but recently i came accross a mobo with 4 slots... does anyone wish to comment... is this common?

mp3guy

Floppy drives don't use IDE

Ruu_Old

Always 2 (that I have seen) IDE channels Primary and Secondary and you can have 2 drives on each channel (Master and Slave). Floppy disk controller is not IDE as mentioned.

hopeful

sparkicks1 wrote:

normally in the mobo theres the hdd, floppy, and disks and i was under the impression that you could only have 3 ide slots ( probally using the wrong termanology but hopefully you understand what i mean anyway)
but recently i came accross a mobo with 4 slots... does anyone wish to comment... is this common?

You do find the occasional board with 3 IDE channels...never seen one with four. I'm guessing what you read meant that the board could accommodate 4 IDE devices on the two IDE channels.
The other possibility is you are talking about PCI slots? Some boards have four of those.

DonkeyStyle \o/

http://support.turtlebeach.com/site/kb_ftp/63516858.asp wrote:

The industry has set up defaults for the IDE interface. Up to four can be
installed in the system, they are called primary, secondary, tertiary and
quaternary. Additionally, two IDE devices can be installed on each
interface, which means up to eight IDE devices can operate simultaneously
in the system (two on each of the four interfaces).

There you are.

The only time I've actually come across this in practice was a harddrive util that let me pick from the aforementioned four IDE channels.

tba

plus, pci slots can have control cards to expand the ide capacity.

But this is all fringe stuff why are you asking? Are you trying to make a file server?