Doesn't it also decrease performance or something?

UnknownDarknessX wrote:

Doesn't it also decrease performance or something?

I've seen it decrease performance when an optical is on the same cable as a HD. My wife's computer will only run at DMA2 with the optical drive on the same channel, but as soon as I put it on the other channel, the HD will run as DMA5.

I have heard many times that the best setup for a multimedia PC with 2 HDD's is to have the Master HDD on IDE 0 and the CD-ROM on IDE 0 as slave.

Then you should have your primary burner on IDE 1 as master, with the 2nd HDD on as IDE 1 slave.

This supposedly helps with copying CD's by having the optical drives on separate channels to avoid underruns and also not creating bandwidth problems in a single channel.

Will this help everyone? All I know is that, years ago (back when CD-R burning was possible for this POS ComCrap), I had issues with coaster creation that went away as soon as I reset the IDE's in the manner I have described. Researching the issue led me to the info I have shared here. This is also how I build them for customers, with no probs so far!

Good luck!

FastVFR45

Exactly, I think that is what I've read somewhere.

Sorry I am getting in late on this but all are correct with keeping them separate. The IDE controller defaults to the slowest drive on that channel so it is always preferable to keep optical drives separate from your HDD's even if you have an ATA66 and and ATA 133 HDD's it will default to the slowest HDD and in this case UDMA2 for ATA66.

fastvfr45 wrote:

I have heard many times that the best setup for a multimedia PC with 2 HDD's is to have the Master HDD on IDE 0 and the CD-ROM on IDE 0 as slave. Then you should have your primary burner on IDE 1 as master, with the 2nd HDD on as IDE 1 slave. This supposedly helps with copying CD's by having the optical drives on separate channels to avoid underruns and also not creating bandwidth problems in a single channel. Will this help everyone? All I know is that, years ago (back when CD-R burning was possible for this POS ComCrap), I had issues with coaster creation that went away as soon as I reset the IDE's in the manner I have described. Researching the issue led me to the info I have shared here. This is also how I build them for customers, with no probs so far! Good luck! FastVFR45

While this may aide in CD burning it will kill your HDD Access times and cut it by 66% if it is an ata133 HDD. If you have issues with copying CD's you can make an ISO image to your Drive then burn it off the drive instead of another CD. Amount of memory comes into play here as well and so does burning speed.

jimartin8219 wrote:

Do this: Primary IDE Master=HD Slave=HD Secondary IDE Master=CDRW Slave=DVDRW Let me know how it works

Very Nice!

~Robrowe~ wrote:

fastvfr45 wrote: I have heard many times that the best setup for a multimedia PC with 2 HDD's is to have the Master HDD on IDE 0 and the CD-ROM on IDE 0 as slave. Then you should have your primary burner on IDE 1 as master, with the 2nd HDD on as IDE 1 slave. This supposedly helps with copying CD's by having the optical drives on separate channels to avoid underruns and also not creating bandwidth problems in a single channel. Will this help everyone? All I know is that, years ago (back when CD-R burning was possible for this POS ComCrap), I had issues with coaster creation that went away as soon as I reset the IDE's in the manner I have described. Researching the issue led me to the info I have shared here. This is also how I build them for customers, with no probs so far! Good luck! FastVFR45 While this may aide in CD burning it will kill your HDD Access times and cut it by 66% if it is an ata133 HDD. If you have issues with copying CD's you can make an ISO image to your Drive then burn it off the drive instead of another CD. Amount of memory comes into play here as well and so does burning speed.

I hate to kill your mojo but your numbers, while in the right direction, are way too overstated. As far as "access times" are concerned, you are not going to suffer a 66% penalty with the same drive (standard 7200 RPM IDE) if the drive is capable of UDMA Mode 6 (ATA133) and you are running it at UDMA Mode 3 (ATA66).

While there are some advanced features and instructions that the later UDMA Modes offer, some which do bump up perceived speed by quite a bit, there really isn't significant speed to be gained in terms of real world speed (for most drives, 7200 RPM IDE). This is because nearly all IDE drives (as of now) do not even come close to being able to transfer from disk (not cache) at the speed of the high UDMA Modes. There are only a handful of 7200 RPM drives that can sustain data rates of 66 MiB/s from the disk, read or write. The catch comes when the drive can send data from it's cache, it is at this point that the drive can make full use of the speed of the interface.

Now if you are using high end IDE drives, the WD Raptor comes to mind, then you are definitely going to want to have it operating at a higher UDMA Mode. For all intents and purposes this post is just designed to show that interface speed is not always the limiting factor. Sometimes the "latest" hardware is still generations behind the interface in some aspects.

-Weaver

Too late here but here's what I think.

I agree with Weaver for the speed reduce.

I have two HD installed on IDE0 and two optical drives installed on IDE1. I once had an HD attached side by side with an optical drive on IDE1 and didn't notice much speed reduce - on my old PIV 1,7.


Installing two optical drives on the same IDE is no problem but write-on-the-fly won't be available because only one device can use an IDE channel in the same time.If you have 512MB of memory and higher and a PC with good specs you won't notice the difference.

ginogsm wrote:

Installing two optical drives on the same IDE is no problem but write-on-the-fly won't be available because only one device can use an IDE channel in the same time.If you have 512MB of memory and higher and a PC with good specs you won't notice the difference.

Actually it would work if current optical media solutions had faster acess times. While it is true that only one device can be on the channel at a time, hard drives manage copying back and forth just fine, don't they? It is a combination of access (seek) time and only one device being allowed on the channel at a time that prevents optical to optical copying on the same channel.

As far as not noticing the difference, I believe that right about now we are nearing the threshold for noticing a difference. Standard consumer hard drives have crossed or are teetering the 50 MiB/s mark for sustained transfer. It isn't terribly hard to find a drive that can sustain > 66 MiB/s, although these drives are considerably more expensive.

A few years from now our entire discussion here will be moot, drives be fast enough to handle today's interfaces, but what about future interfaces? IDE will be dead, SATA will surely be the defacto standard, SCSI will probably move to a serial interface as well. Should be a good time.

-Weaver