ATA Drive question...

[AskPriz]

Hi there...

I don't know where to post this, and this board sounded appropriate, so forgive me if it's in the wrong place.

I have a P3-933 with 256mb of ram, Geforce Ti-4200, etc.

I have 4 drives in my system setup as follows:
Primary Master - 45gb C: drive
Primary Slave - 40gb D: drive
Secondary Master - DVD Rom (E🙂
Secondary Slave - CDRW (F🙂

I have an ATA 100 cable which came with the mobo for the first 2 drives.
The other 2 use the standard 2 drive cable I had before.

When xferring data between C: and D: it takes an extremely long time. Also sometimes, when burning stuff to cd and there's files from both drives, unless I have "copy to drive first" selected, it'll make a coaster. it also doesn't seem to like cd to cdrw direct copies. (I think it complains but I don't remember if I've made coasters.)

Is there some better way to setup the drives? Should I get another ATA100 cable for E: and F:? Swap D: and E: (to make the dvd rom the primary slave and make the 40gb a master drive)?

I've built computers and done all sorts of hardware stuff, but I'm not sure how to handle a situation like this. Hopefully someone can answer this as it seems a little tricky to me.

Thanks in advance...
-Kent

 

[bsauerbr]

Do you have DMA enabled on all drives? Check this in Device Manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers (WinXP) or CDROM and Disk Drives (Win9x)

 

[AskPriz]

Yeah. running xp...

the C and D are listed as "Ultra DMA Mode 5" while E is "Multi-word DMA Mode 2" and F is "Ultra DMA Mode 2".

I'm not sure if that's helpful at all, but thanks for at least replying. Wished I knew the best config. ah well...

 

[amdskip]

Primary Master - 45gb C: drive
Primary Slave - 40gb D: drive
Secondary Master - DVD Rom (E
Secondary Slave - CDRW (F

I would change it to this:

Primary Master - 45gb drive
Primary Slave - cdrw
Secondary Master - 40gb drive
Secondary Slave - dvdrom

Hook up both using those ATA100 cables and see if that helps any.

 

[bsauerbr]

Originally posted by: AskPriz


I'm not sure if that's helpful at all, but thanks for at least replying.

😕 You're welcome, I think.... 🙂 Now you know for sure the drives are configured for the fastest possible transfer mode.

Originally posted by: amdskip

I would change it to this:

Primary Master - 45gb drive
Primary Slave - cdrw
Secondary Master - 40gb drive
Secondary Slave - dvdrom

Is this the idea behind your recommendation?

Depending on how you use the system most, keep the source on one IDE controller, and the destination (CDRW) on the other IDE controller. This will give you full IDE secondary bandwidth to full IDE primary bandwidth.
The setup you're suggesting gives you the best of both worlds so you can read from DVD-ROM or from secondary master hard drive.