IDE 1 & 2 or IDE 1 only?

[Uncle Bob]

Soon I will be building 3 machines for Distributed Computing. The
MOBO's (in the bios) gives the option of enabling Ide 1 & 2 seperatly. Is there any advantage to putting the HHD & cd/rom on IDE 1 (master-slave) or using both channels (master-master)?

Second question:

I do not think I need floppies in this aplication/s. How do you get past a missing floppy in POST?

[MrPurple]

Rule of thumb, you always want to put your optical drives and HDD on different channels. The optical drives are much slower then the HDD and can casue back ups on the cable which causes slower performance, or something like that I forget the details for this.

Also in BIOS, disable floppy. If you did this and you still get that error, then you should look for some option that says do not check for floppy at boot.

long time ago, i was always taught to keep hard drives and cd-roms seperate from each other

[Uncle Bob]

Thanks. I just was curious. On the three "cows" the CD/ROMs will,
I think be used only to load the OS and other software.

[Martoch]

Originally posted by Uncle Bob


I do not think I need floppies in this aplication/s. How do you get past a missing floppy in POST?

Go into the BIOS and disable boot up floppy seek.


I concur with the others, keep your HD & CD-ROM on different channels.

[dr_roberts49]

Words of wisdom. Keep them apart

Robert

[Xeroid]

The only time I have ever put them together is when this dude's primary IDE was blown on his motherboard.

[B71655]

Keep 'em apart. IDE default's to the slowest drive in the chain. Now your floppy question will depend on your bios and mb. The floppy seek in bios is not always there. I havent looked, but you had to tell Win95 not to look on boot. I think that is no longer true. No floppy on new machines in some cases. Good luck.

[thePh@r@oh]

once the IDE2 channel on a clients rig so i had to put the HDD and optical drive together and it worked fine

[Eladijaz]

Originally posted by Uncle Bob
Thanks. I just was curious. On the three "cows" the CD/ROMs will,
I think be used only to load the OS and other software.

Hi,
If they are to be used solely for DC I really wouldn't worry either way. Almost all recent ATA interfaces support independent device timing so it's really only an issue if you intend to use your Hard Disk and CDROM simultaneously (the HDD has to wait for the CDROM). If you've got the cables then there is no harm in adding them (in fact it's good), but don't go and buy more cables for a dedicated DC machine. Even if they didn't support independent timing, if it's a DC machine the HDD performance won't make any real difference to crunching.
Regards,
Elad.