4 EIDE Devices 2 EIDE Channels, what is the best drive layout?

[invinciblesuperchan]

I have a Gigabyte Kt266a mainboard (no raid), 2 ata100 hard disks a LiteOn 16x DVD and a LiteOn 24x CDRW. Where should I put the devices on the two EIDE channels?

I was thinking that I would put the 30GB IBM as my EIDE 1 Master and the DVD as Slave, with the 15GB Maxtor as EIDE 2 Master and the CDRW as Slave. Or would it be better to put the two optical drives on one channel, and the two HDs on the other?

Would that make the most sense?

Thanks.
Loren.

 

[Noriaki]

Hard to say...for optimal CD burning you want the DVD and CDRW on different channels.

Under most usage say games you'll want your main hard drive and your DVD separate...

Which is okay...except that CDRWs aren't suppose to be slaves....so you can't really slave it to your hard drive...

Personally I'd put the two hard drives together, then the CDRW as SecMaster, and the DVD as SecSlave, then if you want to do CD to CD copy, just image to the hard drive first.


Edit:
Oh I'm sure it will come up at some point in the thread. A lot of people seem to think that if you put a CD and a Hard drive on the same channel it will slow the Hard drive to the CD's speed.

That is not true, a hard drive can be in ATA100 with a CD in ATA33 or even PIOMode4 on the same channel without having any effect.

The only problem is if you try to run the master and slave at the same time, then they conflilct for the bus and the performance of both drops quite a bit.

But they don't affect each other's ATA speed.

 

[getbush]

I say just put the optical drives together with the RW as master. I've never had the slightest problem copying CD's with this arrangement, or heard of anyone else having a problem. If anyone has had a problem with that kind of setup, speak up now, but I think they will be just fine on the same channel.

 

[invinciblesuperchan]

Thanks. All of the post so far have been really helpful.

I want to maintain a good through put between the main hard disk (30GB 7200RPM) and the CDRW aswell as between the CDRW to DVD for direct copies. The second hard disk (15GB 7200RPM) is mostly used as a bulk storage space, so throughput isn't my main concern, but I might put Linux Mandrake on it at somtime so I don't want to cripple it's performance.

I was thinking that I might try to find a cheap RAID/EIDE card for the optical drives and give each device it's own channel. That would probably be the best layout. If I do that I could also bring back my EIDE Zip100 somewhere in the chain, but that makes things complicated because the Zip100 isn't DMA compatible.

Can anyone reccomend a good RAID card?

Thanks.
Loren.

 

[xWeston]

as mentioned by getbush... i have run 2 cd drives (one cdrw one normal) on the same bus (secondary) with no problem at all copying CD to CD. Especially with a fast cd burner (24x) only being 3.6MB/s... it isnt even getting close to maxing out the speed of that controller