Are PATA controllers made by ITE any good?

[Nowhere]

Since I ran out of free PATA connections I will get PCI controller...and one that works also with optical drives. Which wasn't that common AFAIK, but apparently this one does it nicely. Or...does it? And can anyone tell if its generally good? I remember that most cheap ATA controllers were POS... OTOH I don't have much choice, it's the only cheap one left that is rather predictably available (not for long I guess...it just dissapeared from website of producer).
Yes, that page/photo is everything I know about it - basically only brand of the chip. Good/bad? (I think I seen their products in many places/on many mobos...perhaps there's a reason)

[Elie]

Why not just buy a SATA2 controller instead, much faster! Unless you already have an IDE drive(s) I would recommend Promise or Hi-Point

[High_Jumbllama]

Promise cannot run CD/DVD drives.

[Elie]

yes but what he can do is, switch the Optical drive to the onboard IDE's and put the drives on the PCI card of choice.
Unless that's not an option?

Regards,
Elie

[MultimediaMan]

That controller looks like it is based on the Silicon Image chip. It may support ATAPI devices, but I'm not sure.

Promise Ultra33/Ultra66 controllers support ATAPI devices at up to 40x speeds(12xDVD IIRC), but any optical drives attached to the controller will not be bootable.

[High_Jumbllama]

yes but what he can do is, switch the Optical drive to the onboard IDE's and put the drives on the PCI card of choice.
Unless that's not an option?

Regards,
Elie

Yes of course but that is not what he asked.

[Elie]

I'm just giving an alternative choice to what Nowhere asked

[Nowhere]

Well, it's PATA only, basically - I just want to connect all the devices I already have. Also, supposedly, controller in SiS chipset (of my mobo) is very good, so I want to keep hard disks there. And even considering that I'll probably buy 250 or 320GB drive in some time...PATA ones are still cheaper, at least here. And not really slower...