Not enough IDE ports

[Rashkae]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> There's a good chance that my next motherboard won't have enough IDE
> ports, and I've got too much IDE hardware to junk it and buy SATA. How
> well do PCI cards that add IDE ports work? Any known gotchas? Does the
> OS see them as different from the M/B's IDE ports? Specifically, I
> need to run two DVD burners and two 400 GB hard drives, all IDE, on a
> motherboard with one IDE controller and one SATA controller. Should
> the hard drives be on the M/B, and the burners (rarely used) on the
> card, or vice versa?
> 

They work great.  The one gotchya:

The cards I've used so far have.. not so great boot support... They can 
boot from a hard drive attached but don't support CD-ROM boot, so you 
should use your MOBO IDE for one of your optical drives.