Reddit reviews StarTech.com 2 Port PCI IDE Controller Adapter Card (PCIIDE2)
We found 3 Reddit comments about StarTech.com 2 Port PCI IDE Controller Adapter Card (PCIIDE2). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Two dual channel IDE connectors support up to four PATA devices on one card2 ChannelTwo dual channel IDE connectors133 MBps28-bit LBA
From your post I think you are going to get out of your league fairly quickly here. You are going to be able to set up 4 hard drives "somewhat" easily. The "somewhat" part is that you are going to have to set 2 of the drives as master and 2 as slaves. You will also have to designate them as primary or secondary depending on which IDE cable they are on.
Each hard drive has a different pin setting to set the drive as a master/slave. You will need to either look on the HD and hope that the pin settings are listed or go to the manufacturers web site to look up the model for the pin settings. As for the 5th drive you will need to install a pci ide hard drive card. You will also need to use another IDE cable.
StarTech.com 2 Port PCI IDE Controller Adapter Card PCIIDE2
As far as the RAM is concerned, no you do not need drivers for it. Once again you are going to need to make sure that the RAM you have is appropriate for the motherboard. A quick google of the serial/model number off the RAM chip should tell you what type/speed it is. Then you will need to google the motherboard serial/part# to find out what type of Ram it takes.
The ethernet card will also require a google to find the drivers.
Don't get me wrong if you are interested in learning how to custom build computers this will be a good learning exercise but be aware there are quite a few pitfalls up ahead.
So basically if you are not familiar with building pc's and discerning part #/serial#'s etc. you are going to get underwater very quickly.
tl;dr Building pc's is harder than it appears with legacy hardware.
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Port-Controller-Adapter-PCIIDE2/dp/B000P9VHOO
if your drive are having different sizes I would just do JBOD or LVM over them (mirror if they come in pairs) as raid means a storage penalty for asymmetric drive sizes. Depends on how you are hooking all the drives up through USB I probably would not recommend using USB for ALL of them. PCI to IDE controller cards are not exactly expensive if you count the fact that each card hosts 4 devices.