Best way to set up 4 ide drives

[CHiWuaN]

I just bought a new 120 GB HD 7200 RPM and now I have 4 IDE drives in my PC. The drives are as follows:

- 120 GB 7200 RPM
- 80 GB 5400 RPM
- Pioneer DVDR A06
- Teac CDRW 24x

The HDD´s are connected each on it´s own channel and both are set as masters. The DVDR and CDRW are on the first and second channel, respectively, and both are slaves.

However, I´m feeling the access times to my drives a little slow. Any suggestions or comments on my config? I have a KT266A chipset, an Athlon 1800+ and 512 MB of RAM.

 

[MrChad]

I have a similar config and have it set up:

PM: Fast primary drive (ATA-100)
PS: Secodary drive (ATA-66)
SM: DVD-ROM
SS: CD-RW

I have heard that CD-RWs should be the master on whatever channel they are on, but I haven't had any problems with mine as a slave drive.

 

[scrubman]

i was having problems with my DVD burner andTDK tech support told me to put both my hard drives on one IDE channel and my DVD burner and my DVD ROM on the other with the burner as a master... seems ok so far but i always thought that the 2 hard disks should not share the same IDE channel... i would like to see more input on this topic from the experts on this board!

 

[TerryMathews]

Well, the arrangement is going to depend hugely on how you use your drives.

First off, modern CD, DVD, and CD/DVD-R drives have a large enough cache that they can be placed master/slave on the same channel and still be able to on-the-fly copy at speeds up to 16x for CDs, generally the maximum you could (safely) do OTF from a CD anyway.

I'm assuming that a lot of the time, data moves from your DVD to one of your HDs. So the DVD should be opposite whichever HD you install to most of the time.

If you don't copy data between the two HDs very often, set them as master/slave on the same channel and be done with it.

 

[EeyoreX]

IMO if you are "feeling" access times are slow one of two things are happening. 1) Things are really slow and the problem is more than where on the cable the drives are. Or 2) you are imagining it. I have a computer set up similar to yours, and I don't notice if things are slow. Copies are nice and snappy, and access time seems great. I actually have 6 IDE drives, two 13GB 5400 rpm drives, 2 200GB 7200 rpm drives, a CD-ROM and a CD-R/W. The 200GB drives are on a Promise controller. The box is a low horsepower file server (Athlon XP 1700+ Pally, 512MB RAM.

\Dan

 

[scrubman]

well... i would rather not have the problem of large data transfers between harddrives when the need arises... and so i liked having them on seperate channels and just made sure that when i was burning to the DVD it was coming from the hard drive that was on the other ide channel... for some reason this DVD burner got locked into PIO mode twice so far with that config though...

 

[0roo0roo]

if you really care about speed during large transfers from drives that maybe on the same cable. buy a cheap silicon image pci controller and keep all drives on separate cables.

 

[sharq]

My setup:
Primary Master: my OS hd
Primary Slave: cd-rw
Secondary Master: dvd-rom
Secondary Slave: my backup hd, no OS

EDIT: Forgot to say this, all depends on what you use the most. My backup hd stores all my files that I don't need all that much, example the software I dl and install on my comp. I use the dvd-rom more than the cdrw, so it is on a seperate channel from my OS hd.

 

[John2583]

I have two hard drives on my primary IDE and a CD/RW and a DVD reader on the secondary IDE. This is the way I've always done it, never had problems. Transfering files in between the two hard drives I can get 30MB/s-45MB/s if I remember correctly.

 

[scrubman]

well cool... thats how i am setup now...