2 CD/DVDs; 1 controller or 2 controllers

[KillerBob]

Guys,

I've been doing a bit of HW moving around, and all my HDs (Raid0 and Data) are on my SATAs. I have a Sony DRU510 DVD/RW and an Asus DVD drive. Can they share the same std. UATA100 controller, or should they be on one each?

Thanks in advance!

 

[ahurtt]

I'd say if you have your hard drives on the SATA controllers and you still have 2 UATA controllers free and 2 dvd drives with nothing else to put on the UATA controllers, put 1 dvd drive on each.

 

[ahurtt]

Oh, but to answer your question, theres no reason the 2 dvds shouldn't be able to share 1 UATA controller leaving the other one free.

 

[KillerBob]

Thanks,

I know the 2 drives can be on the same controller, but due to space in my case, two cables is a bit messy, and I was wondering what the performance hit, if any, would be running both drives off the same controller?

 

[ahurtt]

I think if you have both on 1 controller, with ATA IDE, only one can be accessed at a time. Either the master or the slave. I believe if you put each one on a different controller as masters you can avoid this bottleneck.

 

[jackschmittusa]

I agree with ahurtt.

 

[KillerBob]

I ran a simple test:

I played a CD on one, and burned a CD on the other, at the same time. Both worked fine. Now, that could be because of the buffers involved with the burner, and the fact that when reading a music CD the CD is not accessed all the time, or it could just be that BUS mastering works as supposed to?

I have moved them onto different controllers, but still wonder if that is actually better than running them off one controller.

 

[pyrojunkie]

The only issue that would arise from sharing the controller in this situation is a performance drop from DVD to DVDRW transfers. Its an optimal configuration to seperate the channels, but unless you do drive to drive transfers, you won't notice a perfomance sharing the drives on the same channel.

Other channel sharing problems arise when the transfer modes default to the slowest drive, but since these are both optical drives neither is trying to run ATA100/133.

 

[MrJazz]

Indeed, the transfer rates split in two, each drive gets half of the channel bandwidth.

If you can, install your devices on separate IDE channels.