Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

http://cgi.ebay.com/PCI-ISA-EXPANSION-CARD_W0QQitemZ150119218056QQihZ005QQcategoryZ3668QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Looks like it is ab ISA card with 4 IDE HD ports.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Doesn't that fact alone kind of bother you? 4 IDE ports?!?! There are little or no jumpers on the card, and it has a Cirrus Logic chip on it. Somehow I doubt it's an IDE controller.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Well I figured it was some rare late model upgrade card to let people use larger drives on older ISA system where the BIOS does not allow them.

TH99 doesn't seem to have it documented.

It is not listed at a high price with "rare" on it to be a photoshopped scam, and those connectors do not look video related to me.

Is curiosity going to make you buy it?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I'll have to pass on it. Even if it is an IDE controller, I still wouldn't have much use for it.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

looks like an isa hdd controller with no bios

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

With four IDE connectors? Doesn't that seem like way too many? I think that this card must be some sort of development tool or prototype.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

Not realy my 386 has 4 ide port that are all functional. one on mb, one on floppy/serial/paralle card and 2 on a bios upgrade card. i own celeron mbs with 4 ide ports so a 4 port ide card realy isn't all that strange

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

That looks sort of like the GSI card I had except my card had 2 floppy and 2 IDE connectors with a VESA extension connector.

4 ide ports is not impossible it just eats up addresses making it difficult to impliment without specific hardware. There really is no need for jumpers because each IDE device must reside at specific locations that are not plug and play.

Generally cards like that have the other 2 setting on the secondary IDE address area meaning the other 2 ports on a normal PC are only going to be usefull for driver driven devices like zip drives and cd-drives. Hard drives would only work once you get into windows 95+ after boot as the bios usually doesn't do anything with the secondary address space natively, though I did have a Unsys PC that I trashed with 4 ide ports and bios support, sadly I didnt' have all the daughter cards to get the thing to get past post. Just beeped when the memory count stopped at 64kb.