Using cdroms on raid channels

[Geriatric]

Greets.
I have had a Soyo dragon+ with the kt266 chipset for a year and a half now. I chose it because it had fair to good reviews and a lot onboard. It has been a very stable and fast rig. Now is upgrade time again. The problem I have is that I am spoiled. On this board I can choose to use the raid channels as either raid or ata100. That means I can have 8 ide devices total. That also lets me boot from up to 5 different OS's on 5 different HDD's. I LOVE that. That is why I really got it. Let's just say I really like to tweak and mess with things, and it let's me do that with certain drives, and then boot into a more stable environment for serious stuff.

So, you who are loyal to Asus, Gigabyte, Epox, Abit, MSI, FIC, DFI, Soyo, Soltek, Iwill, Chaintec, Biostar, PCChips even, or the up-n-comers like ASRock and such. Have you seen another board with RAID that allows IDE drives like cd-rw's to be used on those channels in addition to primary and secondary IDE's?

Thanks much for your xperience.

[Chiguy]

I think I remember hearing that the Promise Raid chip works well with CD-drives and the such.

[Geriatric]

Yeah, the chip on this Soyo board is a Promise. I have not seen any other board with a Promise chip on it that allows one to use it for this use though. I believe it is up to the board manufacturer to implement a bios option or board jumper to define the function. On my Soyo board, I have to have the RAID enabled in bios, and also on the board, a jumper to choose whether RAID or ATA 100.

Thanks.