Does dual boot system take a performance hit?

[astroller]

I have a machine running dual boot of Win98 and Win2k. Basically, I have 2 harddisks. The one connected to the Primary IDE Master(C drive) runs Win98. The one connected to the Secondary IDE Master (D drive) runs Win2k. My question is does the drive on a secondary IDE take a performance hit? Considering devices on the Primary Master gets the highest prioty? Am I right or wrong?

 

[cirrus1]

You are a bit wrong The names of the channels, Primary IDE and Secondary IDE, is an identification of the channels and indicates which of the channels that will booted from first. That is the primary IDE. The drive connected to the channel which is dedicated as master on the channel will boot. Therefore it is your HD with Win98 on, that first will be booted.
You don't get a performance hit by having your devices on your Secondary IDE as this channel is just as fast as the primary.
But if you have other and slower devices on your IDE channel it could risk slowing them down.

 

[Diffusion]

No, in that scenario no performance hit will occure, if you were to partition up a hard drive and install one OS on each partition, some of the OSes would be faster then they would normally be, and others would be slower. This is due to thwe fact that areas near the edge of a hard drive platter get faster read times then those near the center (correct me if I have that the wrong way around).

 

[cirrus1]

I think you would get a performance "hit" when the heads have to travel to the edge to read the data therefore giving higher accesstimes

 

[Diffusion]

The edge moves a lot faster then the center, the data transfer rate is much larger at the edges, maybe the seek time is longer, but you move large pieces of data much faster.