2 HD on Promise U100TX2 or 1??

[GTI]

I have 2 HD(WD SE 200GB, Maxtor 8M 120GB), one DVD ROM, one CDRW. MB is MSI 645E Max with ATA133 support on board.

Q1. Should I put both HD on the Promist Ultra100 TX2 card??? OR I should put the WD on the IDE card alone; with the MB Primary master as the Maxtor; and the 2 ATAPI drives on the MB 2nd channel.

Q2. Why the Promise IDE card uses only 1 IRQ for 2 IDE channel whereas motherboard IDE channel uses 1 IRQ for EACH channel???? If I put 2 HD on the Promise card would I be creating contention with the 2 HD fighting for 1 IRQ and therefore not getting max. performance???

Thanks for any comments.

 

[Steven the Leech]

I would put MB IDE 1----HD-master/cdrw-slave.
MB IDE 2----HD Master/dvd slave.

Or I would try the cdr/dvd on the promise tx2 card and see if you could burn correctly, and if so i would but the HD on MB on seperate channels and cdr/dvd on the tx2 on seperate channels.

 

[GTI]

Thanks Steven.
Does that mean you think using the HD on the Motherboard IDE is better than using the Promise IDE card??? One of the reason I want to use the Promise even though I have only 4 IDE devices is that I want each of the 4 devices to be master devices since I have a total of 4 IDE channels with the promise card. Is that a good thing to do or not??

One thing I notice is that I got better score from Sandra HD test with the WD on the Promise card than the Maxtor on the Motherboard with the Maxtor running ATA133???
Either the Promise is doing some magic or the Maxtor is actually slower.

I am still puzzled as to whether using only 1 IRQ for the Promise card would slow down 2 HD connected to the 2 channels on the Promise card as master devices.

 

[SUOrangeman]

3 HDs + DVD/CDRW combo + Zip 250

All of my HDs are on a U100TX2 in a 64-bit/66MHz PCI slot. Main HD on a channel by itself with the other two sharing the secondary. Other devices on the motherboard's secondary channel.

And to think, my two IBM 60GXPs are still alive ... even though I'm only going to use them for backup drives forever!

-SUO