How to hook up CDs and HDs

[Armadel]

I have 2 HDs, 1 CD-R, and 1 CDRW.

Is it better to hook up the 2 CDs on one IDE and the 2 HDs on the other, or to split them up ?

The HDs get most of the activity.

thanks

armadel

[evilphantomx]

i always put both hdd on the same ide channel ....both are ata 133 so i only use an 80 wire cable on those and a standard 40 wire cable on the optical drives....others may have diff. opinions though

[sweeper2]

I usually hook up both HD's to IDE1 using one ide cable making sure one is set to master and one to slave and then my cd-rom and my cd/rw to IDE2 using one ide cable making sure one is set to master and one is set to slave.

[LeftCoast]

What are the specifics of the HDDs? Certain brands have different jumper settings.

Usually, it's master on the far end of cable, with slave on the middle. Or you can jumper them both to cable select, and let the bios seek out the boot drive.

On the second IDE, master the cd-rom (or dvd-rom) on the far end of cable, and slave the cd-rw. I remember seeing this as the way to go from a few different sites, and Dell ships all their boxes with two drives this way.

[sweeper2]

Originally posted by LeftCoast
What are the specifics of the HDDs? Certain brands have different jumper settings.

Usually, it's master on the far end of cable, with slave on the middle. Or you can jumper them both to cable select, and let the bios seek out the boot drive.

On the second IDE, master the cd-rom (or dvd-rom) on the far end of cable, and slave the cd-rw. I remember seeing this as the way to go from a few different sites, and Dell ships all their boxes with two drives this way.

great explanation...

[wju425]

I used to have this setup for the greatest speed in file trasfers. Now I'm just on 1 drive and 1 cd-rom (burner).

IDE 0:
master - hard drive (boot device) (now)
slave - cd-rom (reader)

IDE !:
master - cd-rom (burner) (now)
slave - hard drive (storage) (I didn't have that)

They all have 80wire cables. Most of your file transfers will be on two channels instead of within a channel which makes it faster.

\o/ Billy

[elroy]

I seem to recall if you put 2 devices that run at different speeds on the same channel both of them will run at the speed of the slower device. So you would not want to put a new ata133 hd together with an old ata33 hd. Most all cd-roms are ata33.

[zepper]

For best performance, I would want each drive on its own channel. Syba controller on dealsonic.com - about $22. shipped.
. If all drives are capable of ATA-66 or better, then it doesn't matter too much. I would have a HD and an optical on each channel. For best perf., you want the target drive on a separate channel from the source drive in any data transfer activity.
. If any of your drives are ATA-33 or DMA-2/PIO, they need to be segregated (Syba controller again) or replaced.
.bh.

[Armadel]

Zepper, would you buy 2 cards and put each CD onto its own channel ?

Thanks again.

[John Prophet]

If you put an ata133 hard drive on a cable with a ata33 cdrom..then the hard drive will also only run at ata33..so you will lose a lot of speed.

SO maybe the hard drives should go on the cable together.....UNLESS you do a LOT of transferring between hard drives...like massive backups or something...because only one drive can use the cable at once etc and one drive would have to wait for the other etc.

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overall I think Id put the 2 hard drives on the same cable...ut the one with the OS as master and the other as slave.