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2 IDE Drives (CD-RW & DVD): Is this the best way?

J

Janus

Senior member
I have two IDE devices, a Pioneer slot load DVD drive and a Plextor 12/10/32A - currently set up on the IDE secondary channel as master and slave. My IDE primary master is my system HDD. I was wondering whether adding a Promise Ultra100TX IDE card would be a better method for connecting the two CD drives since I do a lot of CD to CD copying (e.g. CD-RW on the Promise card and DVD on the secondary IDE, etc.) and I understand that sharing one IDE channel for two drives is less than optimal. Since NewEgg has the Promise Ultra100TX card for $23 right now, figured it might be a solution.

Is this the right thinking and if so, what's the best way to configure this whole system? For my system specs, check out the link in my signature if you need more information.

Thanks as always!
 
That's how I have mine set up. HDD on Promise card, DVD on primary master, CDRW on secondary master. Works great.
 
10.2GB Quantum 5400rpm ATA/33 - Primary Master
27.2GB Maxtor 7200rpm ATA/66 - Primary Slave

Toshiba SM-1102 IDE DVD-ROM: Secondary Master
Plextor 16/10/40A IDE CD-RW: Secondary Slave
 
Why dont you put the dvd on the primary slave and the burner as the secondary master?
That way you can burn on the fly cd to cd?
Having to drives on an IDE isnt bad, but data cant read from both at the same time. Better to have the cd drives on seperate channels to burn. Shouldnt need the card.
 
I thought for some reason if you ran two IDE devices on the same channel, the overall performance of the IDE devices will be slowed down to the accommodate the slowest drive. In this case, I wouldn't want to slow down my ATA/100 HDD on the primary master by putting a DVD drive on the primary slave. Plus what happens if I try to watch a DVD movie or install from my DVD drive to the HDD - wouldn't that take a performance hit since both would be residing on the IDE primary channel? Seems like I were going to go the 2 IDE devices on one channel, wouldn't I want the HDD as the primary master and the CD-RW as the primary slave? But if I do that, wouldn't I run into problems packet writing or writing data from the HDD to the CD-RW? With these situations in mind, wouldn't this make the justification for a separate IDE add-on card?

Alright, maybe I'm totally confused, someone want to help me clear my brain fog?
 
Well I put an end to this situation by visiting my local ma/pa computer store, picked up a Promise Ultra 66 controller for $10 and now have everything running just dandy thanks to WinXPs built-in drivers for the Promise cards. I considered the Ultra 100TX card but really I suspect the Ultra 66 card will last me awhile as far as DVD/CD-RW speeds are concerned (and if not, $10 isn't that much of an investment to lose.)
 
hmm, I personally question that whole performance decrease when drives share a channel thing.. I don't think it's been proven, and on top of that, I saw a Toms Hardware article running RAID with two IDE drives (75GXP's) ON THE SAME CHANNEL getting the same performance as when drives were on different channels.

I don't know what was happening, but it makes me question whether or not we'd get a performance decrease sharing channels. at the very least this could save me an IRQ when I buy another IDE drive, and prevent me from wanting to go SCSI (after all, if I'm going to buy a controller card, it might as well be my first step going SCSI).
 
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