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A question about hard drives on the same channel

T

ThatDumbGuy

Senior member
Right now, my 40gb seagate barracuda ataIII (7200rpm, ata100) is the sole device on my drive. I just bought my wife a new 80gb barracuda IV, so her old wd caviar 13gb (5400rpm, ata-66). Were I to hook this drive up as my primary slave (I have my cdrom and cdrw on the other channel), what circumstances would slow down either drive from being on the same channel? Only when moving files between them? Does this slowdown exist, and, more importantly, will I really notice it? If it applies, both will have ntfs format in winxp home. I can't really move my cd drives... if i move my cd-rw, burning iso's will suck, and if i move my cd-rom drive, disc to disc copy will be better (but i don't really do that), but other than that, it will suck for moving data from that drive to the cd-rom (installing stuff, puttin my cd's into windows media player, and WRITING iso's). Maybe I should just buy a controller card?
 
I know that when a CD-ROM and a hard-drive share a channel, the CD loses quite a bit of performance. But when you have your primary channel on harddrives and secondary on CDs, it should be ok!.
 
so having the second hard drive on the channel won't slow down my master hard drive? Can hard drives perform read or write operations on the same channel on the same time?
 
Connect it as a slave to your master, you won't really notice anything in terms of performance. I have an ATA66 5400 and an ATA100 7200 on the same channel, performance is fine and there isn't slowdown when transferring files between the two.

IDE drives can function at two different speeds on the same channel, you'll be fine.

--Mark
 
cool... just making sure, i know there is a theoretical performance loss, but sometimes people go to far when they talk about things like that, and act like its a huge deal. Thanks.
 
I may be misinformed, but I remember it used to be that the channel slowed to the speed of the slowest device (in your case, ATA/66). And even then it wouldn't matter, because the real-world PC difference between 66 and 100 is minimal.

Things may have changed too.
 
The drives will operate at their optimal speed, it's really more of a matter of whether the channel itself can handle it. IDE chains can only access one device on the chain at any given time. So if you were to transfer files from or to both drives simultaneously (be it between them or at once to some other device), it would theoretically slow down because the controller can only read from one drive at a time. Normally, you don't see this as being a big deal because you rarely encounter a time when two drives are accessed simultaneously and even if you were accessing only one drive at a time and transfering between them, the buffers usually balances out any slow-downs (the buffer fills and then is able to burst out data faster the next time the drive is accessed). The only time in which you'll see a really annoying slow-down would be if you were transfering small, random files (say 4 KB each or something) that were scattered across your drive. The buffer on the drive wouldn't know what data would be transfered next and hence, you'll see a pretty drastic slowdown (I use to have IDE drives and the data throughput was cut in half). But I'm guessing you don't have THAT many small files scattered across your drive that you would need to transfer all at once so it's not that big of a deal.
 


<< I may be misinformed, but I remember it used to be that the channel slowed to the speed of the slowest device (in your case, ATA/66). And even then it wouldn't matter, because the real-world PC difference between 66 and 100 is minimal.

Things may have changed too. >>



You weren't misinformed, it just stoped being true approx 3 years ago with the developement of new IDE controllers that support independent device timings.
 
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