2 hard drives, 2 cd-roms, and 1 question

[demontooth]

I have 2 hard drives, a DVD-rom and a CD-RW drive. How am I supposed to hook these up without degrading performance? I have:

Pcchips 810LMR
750 duron
1 gig SDRAM

If you slave the cdroms on the hard drives it degrades performance on the hard drives, if I slave the DVD-rom off the CD-RW, I get a message telling me I shouldn't do that because I will get buffer underrun errors. Any suggestions?

 

[CaesarCaligula]

This is probably wrong but...

If the 2 hds are ATA100 and your mobo has ATA100 built in, I would put the 2 Hds on the same IDE interface and then your CDRW on the master on the second. When you burn from a cd to cd, just make sure its not on the fly.

If your mobo doesnt support ATA 100, then I could make the @ hds each master and put the cd rw on the chain that you will be doing the least burning(from HD) from. e.g. if you keep all your mp3s on the second HD, put the CDrw on the first chain.

I could be wrong though
Caesar

 

[techwanabe]

Here is how I have mine set up, and I have all available channels used. Primary channel had my master and slave hard drives on it. Secondary channel has my CD ROM as master and CDRW as the slave. I've never gotten buffer under run warning messages. However, my CDRW has the burn proof feature and so far I haven't burned any coasters. I don't burn CD-W on the fly just to be safe. Since my drive is 16x burn speed, it's fast enough that I don't mind waiting for it to finish before I do something else.

I have read that if you are doing multiple processes with IDE hookups, you can get performance degradation. That is the purpose for the buffer underrun prevention technology like burn proof and smart burn if I understand it correctly. The way around the problem of performance degredations requires you use a SCSI CDRW drive which requires a SCSI interface card too. Others may chime in with comments.

 

[demontooth]

boing!

 

[TheKub]

My setup on a Kt7

Primary-Primary Master: WD 100GB @ 7200
Primary-Primary Slave: None
Primary-Secondary Master: IBM 60GB @7200
Primary-Secondary Slave: IBM 45GB @7200
Secondary-Primary Master: WD 15GB @5400
Secondary-Primary Slave: 40x CDROM (where I would put my burner if I could get it to work in XP)
Secondary-Secondary Master:WD 15GB @5400
Secondary-Secondary Slave: DVD

Dont know if its the best but works fine for me...

 

[Vincent]

Get an add-on IDE controller.

 

[khtm]

You WANT the hds to be on different IDE cables and the CD drives to be on different IDE cables.

There's a couple reasons for this:
1) when you're transferring data from hd to hd, you'll notice a decrease in speed if they're on the same IDE channel
2) when you're copying a CD, same result.

So, put one hd and your cdrw on the primary channel and the 2nd hd and dvd-rom drive on the secondary channel.

-khtm-

 

[Oyeve]

Go SCSI.

 

[lazybum550]

Since my motherboard does not support ata66 i bought a ata 66 card. I have 3 hdd's( 2 are ata66) and 2 cdrom. So i put the 2 ata66 hdd's by themselves on seperate ide channels on the ata66 card and put my cd writer by itself on the 2nd ide on the motherboard, and have my dvd rom as a slave to my 3rd hdd on my first ide on my motherboard.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

With four drives you don't need an add-on card that some others have suggested, and contrary to popular opinion, "you can use a ATA33 drive on a ATA66/100/133 channel and since all current controllers provide independent device timing, they will not affect each other's operation." This is quoted from a FAQ article that you can find here. So, my advice would be separate the DVD-ROM and CD-RW from each other. If you burn mostly from the second hard drive, then put the CD-RW as slave on the primary channel. If you burn mostly from the primary hard drive, then put the CD-RW on the secondary channel.

 

[spikegifted]

<< Go SCSI. >>



spot on!!