IDE Controller Chip for optical drives

[Jim]

Can anyone recommend the most compatible IDE controller chip for optical drives in the form of an add-in card (PCIe)? JMicron? I'm in the process of upgrading the motherboard and the new board only has one IDE channel (2 devices). I have four optical drives I use in various combinations for ripping my audio CD collection, backing up DVD's, and burning DVD's.

[Halc]

Silicon Image CMD680 (sometimes labelled CMD0680).

It is the _only_ one that just works (sans integrated moberboard chipset controllers)

I've tried most of them myself.

Doesn't really matter which manufacturer you choose, as the chip is CMD680. You'll be using Silicon Image reference drivers anyway.

The only thing of note is that if you already have ANY other silicon image controller on your motherboard (whether SATA or PATA), you cannot use an additional PCI card with another Silicon chip inside it.

Both cards will try to load their boot rom into the same address space and only one of them will work (or neither).

The trick would be to be able to disable the boot rom from either controller. This can be only done on some PCI-cards and I haven't seen ones that have the "disable boot rom" jumper for a while now.

Thus, two SIL chips cannot be easily used at the same time on the same machine.

[Ian]

Thanks for the heads up Halc. That's good to know.

[Gen-An]

I have three Silicon Image-based add-in cards in my system, one 680A PCI IDE card, one 3112 PCI SATA card and one 3512 PCI-E SATA card, and all work. I can't imagine a motherboard add-in chip would work that much differently, but it's possible.

[Halc]

Gen-An,

interesting. Do they all have boot code enabled? That is, do they post themselves (each controller) during the Bios post sequence?

I haven't ever seen anyone who has able to get two PCI SIL controllers with boot rom enabled to work at the same time.

[Gen-An]

Gen-An,

interesting. Do they all have boot code enabled? That is, do they post themselves (each controller) during the Bios post sequence?

I haven't ever seen anyone who has able to get two PCI SIL controllers with boot rom enabled to work at the same time.

Yes, both have Boot ROM enabled and they both show up at POST.