CDRW and DVD Help???

[Shuten]

I just built my own system and installed a dvd
and a cdrw drives on the same cable. When i
run Nero it says that they shoudl be on different
cables but i only have two ide ports. Should i put
the cdrw on the hard drive cable?

Thank in advance

 

[AndyHui]

You can, but personally I am not too fussed about cable placements. For best performance if you want to copy disk to disk on the fly, you need to have the DVD and CDRW drives on separate IDE ports (ie separate cables).

If you don't do many disk copies, or copy on the fly, then there is no harm with placing both drives on the same port/cable. If you do place them on the same cable, it is suggested that you make the CDRW the master drive and the DVD the slave drive.

Make sure that you have DMA enabled for both drives for best performance.

 

[VBboy]

It's not usually a good idea to have it set up the way you do. Connect a DVD or a CDRW on the same channel (cable) as the main HD, and put the other DVD or CDRW on the other channel (cable). This way, there is less chance of a buffer underrun.

 

[AndyHui]

With most recent CDRW drives coming with some sort of coaster protection such as BurnProof or JustLink, the buffer under-run justification is not really relevant anymore. Any decent machine is not going to have very many buffer under-runs anyway.

 

[VBboy]

Shuten,

Another thing: if your CDRW does not have a large buffer or buffer underrun protection, you should definitely place them on different channels.

 

[JohnnyPC]

Strange but since waaaay back coming from a reliable source I have always been of the belief that only the fastest of the IDE devices should be on the same channel. IE HD HD on one and then any CDroms on the other. Something about a weak link in thchain if you happen to group the relatively slower CDrom with the relatively faster HD. Be interesting to see if somebody could come up with an info link showing the particular benefits of one way over the other...so we can all adjust our thinking once and for all...

 

[AndyHui]

It used to be the case, with the older chipsets, where devices on an IDE port were all put at the same speed as the slowest device.

This is no longer the case, where all modern chipsets support independent device timing and speeds. If, for example, you have an ATA66 device and an ATA33 device on an ATA66 controller, each device should run at its maximum transfer rate.

 

[VBboy]

JohnnyPC,

That's wrong. Forget what you heard If you have 2 devices on the IDE channel (cable), only ONE of them can be transferring data at a time. So if you have 2 hard drives on the same IDE channel, and are trying to copy a huge file from one HD to another, it will up to twice as long as if they were on different IDE channels.

Same with your DVD/CDRW. CDRW wants to write data, but the DVD is just getting it. CDRW runs out of data in its buffer, and you get a coaster.

 

[Shuten]

My understanding to this point from the manuals provided is
that the fastest should be the master and the slowest the slave.
So by this reasoning should i have the harddrive and the cdrw
on one channel and the dvd on a seperate??

Another question is this.. I have onboard audio and there is only
one port for an audio in on the board, but both the cdrw and the
dvd player have audio out capabilities, does this mean that i can
only listen to cds in the dvd? Is there a cable i can buy?


Thanks

 

[AndyHui]

If you are using WinME, Win2K or WinXP, go to the Drive Properties under Device Manager and Select Enable Digital CD Audio.

This will transfer the CD audio data over the IDE cable instead of requiring the CD Audio cable to be attached.

 

[Shuten]

I have win 98se... Is there a cable out there?