Pci Ide Controller Card

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this.

I was looking to get a PCI Promise ATA ultra 100 controller card. I want to add more drives to my system.

Click here for web site.

http://www.promise.com/product/images/U100_TX2.jpg

I have set up quite a few system that have onboard Promise RAID controllers. On those systems when using the IDE channels there is a long "detecting..." at startup. The delay is there even if the RAID is not enabled and it is setup as an IDE controller.

My question is, will the addon PCI card have the same delay or not? I have looked for this information but I can't seem to find it.

Note: This is not a RAID controller card.

Thanks. :)

I have this card. It is in a system that i do not use daily anymore.

There is an extra delay upon startup. I have not timed it; I would say less than 30 seconds. The detection progress is displayed on screen, so I could time it exactly.
Also I feel the delay is longer, if there are no drives attached to it, than when you do attach drives to it.

Thankyou for the information. No need to time it. It sounds like the same amount of time that the onboard RAID controller. You have been helpfull. :)

Your welcome.

I like to add, that with drives attached to the controller, I would say the delay is less than 15 seconds. (all my hdd are 7200 rpm)

i have a ide controller card with both my hard drives attached to it, it shows info when u first turn the computer on, my delay time is around 2 seconds, thats pretty good. (i have two 7200rpm hard drives)

Just thought i'll let you know.

@greglanexp,

Is that the same Promise IDE controller card or another brand or something?

When greglanexp said around 2 seconds, I needed to know it myself.

So I hooked up a monitor,etc. on my other pc and watched:
2 to 3 seconds delay with 4 hd's attached to it.
I have restarted about 5 times and 2 times after power off: each time under 3 seconds.

It is not the time I remembered. But the difference must be that now this card is in a faster pc.

I think you might find the delay longer if you only use one of the channels. If I use a single older drive it can be about 20 seconds. With no drives attached or an unrecognised drive it can sit there for quite a while, maybe 30 seconds or more.
With all channels used and newer drives it should only be a slight delay.

Are you using an ata 100 or is that image just an example?
It's what I have now but I wondered about adding an ultra ata 133 to get my newer drives off the board IDE's so I can use unrecognised drives which the motherboard's IDE's do recognise.
I wonder about the performance/cost benefit of the ata 133 though.

Also curious if anyone has been successful in reflashing the bios on these cards?
I've tried a few times with the bios and flash program Maxtor supplies and it says it went in OK but when I restart, the bios build date is still 1999 !

Oh, and Maxtor claims the second IDE led connection is an unsupported feature of these cards. I asked for the pin arrangement becuase the installation manual points to it but polarity and channel weren't listed.
The "unofficial answer" from a Maxtor tech was that it would void warranty if you used the pins , but it really shouldn't be a problem to do so. (?!?!?)

If I remember right, the outside pins of the four pin arrangement are positive, the inner 2 negative. Ide 1 is closest to the board edge.

These are still made by promise I believe >
http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/accessor..._card/index.htm
http://www.maxstore.com/product.asp?sku=1856734

He mentioned

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I was looking to get a PCI Promise ATA ultra 100 controller card.

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So I think it is 100.

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Originally posted by balamm*@21 June 2003 - 22:11
I think you might find the delay longer if you only use one of the channels. If I use a single older drive it can be about 20 seconds. With no drives attached or an unrecognised drive it can sit there for quite a while, maybe 30 seconds or more.
With all channels used and newer drives it should only be a slight delay.

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I remember that I left the card inside without any drive attached to it in my older P2 system. I think the delay was then between 20 and 30 seconds.

Mine is the one in the picture: ata 100.
Should I buy another one, it will be an ata 133 card, as my new hd's are.
I have never flashed this card. And it recognizes all my 3 different brands of hd.

Does the difference not mean an increase of speed of about 30 % ?

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Does the difference not mean an increase of speed of about 30 % ?

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Only if the drive you connect to it supports ultra ATA/133 but do they actually run at 133 or is that just a max rating?

Ultra ATA/100 drives would apparently see no benefit meaning none of my ATA/100 7200 rpm drives would benefit from it unless access time is faster.
And I don't know if yours is the same, but my ata card won't work with removeable media.
I still have a bunch of DMA and PIO drives I use for storage of email and documents and other slow media.
If there was some other timing advantage to ATA/133 then I'd go for it now because the price on those sites above is half what I paid for the ATA/100 8 months ago.

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Originally posted by balamm*@22 June 2003 - 11:54
Only if the drive you connect to it supports ultra ATA/133 but do they actually run at 133 or is that just a max rating?

And I don't know if yours is the same, but my ata card won't work with removeable media.

because the price on those sites above is half what I paid for the ATA/100 8 months ago.

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I can't say for sure, but I think the card can perform on this speed and it is the hdd that has this for max rating.

Yes, I remember connecting a CDRW to the controller. It recognizes it (displayed correctly on screen), but playing a Cd not good at all. At that time I used an old HP CDRW 2x4x24x.
I have now a new Sony CDRW, but have not tried this one.

At this moment I have no plans for a new controller. I think by that time these ata/100 controllers will not be for sell anymore.
But my choice would also be depending on price and the reason for use.

I was thinking of purchasing a card. I have the option to get the ATA133 but after looking at the hard disk maximum transfer rates, I cannot justify getting the 133 over the 100. The drives just don't use that extra bandwidth, even the ATA133 drives. If I was looking for the 'best" (expensive) I would be looking into 'Serial ATA' but then I would have to buy new hard disks.

The whole purpose of this thread was to find out if I could get a card that wouldn't add any delay to the startup time. I was intending to do this to more than one PC, so it's worth the research to find one that has no delay. Does anyone know of such a card?