IDE or UATA controller card issues with Optical Drives

[abort47]

So I built a new computer to speed up rendering withan i7 and a MSI P67A G45 motherboard... but the motherboard is all SATA... I want to be able to use my older DVD burners to duplicate projects more quickly. I had an old Promise UATA133 RAID card that goes in a PCI slot but although it looks like the bios sees it, it doesn't seem to recognize my optical drives correctly, and Win7 doesn''t seem to see anything connected to the card or the card at all.

Is there any way to use IDE or UATA optical drives with my new motherboard?

[Ian]

Optical drives usually don't work well with addon cards like that. You're probably better off getting an IDE to SATA adapter like this or making the drives external.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822998001

[Dartman]

I have that exact adapter I was using when I had more IDE then SATA drives and a newer board like yours with limited IDE ports. They work well, even with optical drives but you need a floppy power connecter and a standard one for each one you use as it needs it's own power from the floppy one to work. They also tend to work loose over time so if you get one and suddenly the drive disappears it probably worked loose.
I also have addon card that has the Silicon image 3124 chipset for extra SATA ports and it works well with every drive I've tried as far as hard drives or burners, even with the RAID drivers installed, and the raid bios enabled. That would be in case you go the other way with time and start getting more devices that use SATA then your new board supports, which happened to me too
I wish the enthusiast boards had tons of extra ports like my older dual core and single core geek boards used to have. I had 8 SATA ports, 4 IDE, 1394, and 8 USB with one of the boards I used to run and I used most of them...