Actually this "extra" IDE port can come in handy sometimes.  My son had two
hard drives, an IDE Zip drive, a CDRW and a CDROM in his machine.  He did
it with the 4 standard ports supporting the hard drives, Zip drive and CDRW
and the IDE on the SB card connected to the CDROM drive.  All worked
fine!  However, only a CDROM will work on the SB IDE port.

Doug

At 6/24/2003 07:34 PM, Fran wrote:

>Peter, I know exactly what you speak of. I have seen those cards with as
>many as 3 proprietary connectors, usually of varying lengths. This one is
>actually marked as IDE.
>
>Fran
>   ----- Original Message -----
>
>     If you double check that "IDE" port, I'll bet you find it may well be
> a proprietary port for a CD drive. Matsushita [Panasonic] was a popular
> one back then, used on their 1X and 2X drives. It is a double row, 40 pin
> connector, just like an IDE, but the pinout is different. Most CD drives
> used a proprietary interface back then. It wasn't until they got up to
> 4-8X that they started switching over to IDE.
>     Sony and Mitsumi were the other 2 popular proprietary interfaces used
> back then, they were both shorter than 40 pins.
>
>   Peter Hogan

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml