ide

My garage penguin required extra IDE interfaces, because all existing 4 device slots were in use. It was once possible to get older legacy IDE PCI cards that can directly create IDE interfaces that appear as ide2 and ide3 . I have not now been able to buy anything like this. What is available are PCI devices that are sold primarily as RAID controllers and their assorted chipsets which implement various raid levels. For my garage penguin I do not want or require RAID, just extra IDE slots.

The RAID functionality is created on custom chip sets, many of which have Linux drivers either reverse engineered or kindly created by the manufacturer. After buying a number of IDE cards that I could not get going on Linux due to lack of vendor or open source Linux drivers, I luckily encountered this product at a local bargain PC supply shop. It cost all of $20. Nice web support site with source code for both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. The supplied code compiled without any further trouble. The product pictured here used the ITE8212 RAID chipset. When the module is installed it will discover the IDE devices attached and these are presented to the kernel as scsi disks sda,sdb,sdc etc etc depending on what other scsi , real or virtual, are allready present and active on the system. These virtual scsi disks may be fdisked, fscked, mke2fsed, dd ed, whatever....and actually used as disks!

The little CD that came also included an extensive set of drivers for you poor sods that still have to run DOZE.

Currently available at swap meets and PC bargain places in Melbourne.

I would like to recommend this product to linux users that require extra IDE channels , it worked first time for me.

Naturally the picture on the box looked nothing like the card supplied. The box does mention the ITE8212 chipset but you have to look very carefully. So happy the card is ROHS compliant. One less beached whale, oh well.