how should drives be connected?

[lreid]

I have currently 2 ibm 7200rpm 30 gb hard drives on primary mas/slave and dvd burner and dvd rom on sec master/slave.

I have heard that you need to keep the dvd's on sep busses.
Is that true? if so how should i do that? I thought that the hard drive on each bus will run at the same speed as slowest device?

thanks, lreid

[[Neo770]]

All the drives will run at there proper spedd its fine the way you have it setup. But if you had channel 1 with a HDD and a dvd and the other channel with a HDD and DVD then you would probably be able to get better HDD to HDD copy rates. But if your happy with the way its performing at the moment then its all good.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Putting a slower device like a CD/DVD drive on an IDE channel with a HDD will slow your system down.

Bill

[Telexen]

Originally posted by Bill in SD, CA
Putting a slower device like a CD/DVD drive on an IDE channel with a HDD will slow your system down.

Bill

May slow your systme down ... there's no evidence to support that it really does.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Just what I've been taught over the years.

Hard Disk and ATAPI Device Channel Sharing: There are several reasons why optical drives (or other ATAPI devices) should not be shared on the same channel as a fast hard disk. ATAPI allows the use of the same physical channels as IDE/ATA, but it is not the same protocol; ATAPI uses a much more complicated command structure. Opticals are also generally much slower devices than hard disks, so they can slow a hard disk down when sharing a channel. Finally, some ATAPI devices cannot deal with DMA bus mastering drivers, and will cause a problem if you try to enable bus mastering for a hard disk on a channel they are using

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...erformance.htm

Maybe things have changed. I'm open for more learning in this area.

Thanks,

Bill

[daveleau]

What Bill in SD, CA says is the common idea for drives. It is what I have always gone by.

Technically, today's hardware is not effected by the drive setup, though. The new drives and new IDE controllers can handle 2 drives of different speeds, whether they are optical or magnetic.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Thanks for the heads up Dave!

Bill

[muno]

Yes, old days the setup should've been like this:
Primary ide: hdd master, dvd slave
Secondary ide: hdd master, dvd slave

But not anymore, isn't technology wonderful... There's no magic knowledge anymore, nothing you can do to tweak your conventional memory over 600kb...
-M