[Solved] Are there any systems that support 4 PATA and 2 SATA?

Hello everyone. This is my first post of Tom's Hardware.

My old system finally went down (with the infamous "a disk read error has occurred" error). The data is on my drive, the PC just won't boot off the drive, despite having run FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, CHKDSK /R, etc. It seems that most people who receive this error eventually discover that it's hardware related, and not necessarily the drive. Well, I've checked my BIOS, my cables, the battery level, etc, etc, etc, and no dice.

So I'm going to spring for a different box.

Here's the thing though: I want to use both of my PATA hard drives and at least one of my PATA DVD burners in a system that can support DDR2 memory.


So here's my question:

Can you think of any systems that have the following?

1. Enough Drive bays for 2 internal HD's, two internal DVD-ROM's and a floppy
2. Support for 4 PATA drives
3. Support for at least one SATA drive (THIS IS NEGOTIABLE!)
4. DDR2 memory
5. Available PCI slots

Any major systems manufacturers release anything like this? I was looking at used Dell GX280's on eBay, but they only support 2 PATA's and 1 SATA.

What would you suggest?


My current (broken) system has 2 HD's, 2 DVD-ROM's, a 3.5" floppy, a 5.25" floppy, and a zip drive. Not too many systems that will support that kind of setup anymore, I guess.

I'm actually not looking for a new system, preferably something older (the economy, you know...)

Any ideas on slightly older system (2004-2007) that meet the criteria? If not, your idea sounds like it would work.

Well, I've got pretty much everything except for the mobo. I've got a ton of extra DDR2-533 RAM sitting around (like 16 GB), so I'd like to use that if possible. My old machine has RAMBUS memory, so it's pretty much useless.

I don't have any SATA drives, so I'd like to be able to use both IDE HD's and the IDE DVD-ROM drives.

I have an AGP and PCI video card I use for a dual-monitor setup.

Well, I am sorry I did not exactly hit your requirements on the nose, but it does have one PCI slot. and if you tweak your system a bit, be able to have 2 Hard Drives via the external 3.5 floppy cage, and 1 CD/DVD drive.

If you need a cheap solution it is quite cheap indeed.

Sorry for the confusion etc. I am really lost today.