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Does running 5 IDE devices on a non-RAID system cause instability?

Siddhartha

Siddhartha

Lifer
A co-worker of mine is experiencing incredible instability, BSOD, freezes, black screens, the 8X CD burner barely running at 1X, etc, from his P3 450 mHz system. I suspect the problem is caused by running 5 IDE devices on his non-RAID system. I am I correct on this?

He has replaced the powersupply and C drive, and checked the ram.
 
He may very have other problems as well, but configuring 5 IDE devices on a system with only 2 IDE ports is going to necessitate having at least 3 IDE devices on one of the IDE ports.

I'd suggest considering replacing the smaller drives with one drive and/or installing an IDE card by Promise or other vendor to provide two additional IDE ports to eliminate or minimize master/slave device configurations.

Hope this helps!
 
Well, I'm running 6 IDE devices in a non-RAID system, and I'm perfectly stable. I've got the following running on 3 channels of the 4 on my dragon plus mobo:

3 HDDs
16x DVD-ROM
6/4/20 CD-RW
Zip 100

I ran 5 IDE devices in my old P2-350 system (everything above with the exception of 1 HDD, and the DVD-ROM was different), on my 2 on-board and a promise Ultra66 controller.
 
What OS is it? If it's Windows 9x/Me I would tend to blame the OS.

I have 3 IDE HD and and IDE DVD-rom running off of my mobo's IDE controllers and a Maxtor (made by Promise) ATA100 controller driving my IDE CD-RW. My system is an older ABIT BX6-r2 with a PIII-500 running Windows 2000 and it runs perfectly. I can burn at 16x without any issues (LGe 8160b).

(yes I know I would get better performance running my hard drives off the ATA100 card, but I didn't feel like reorganizing it.)


 
Your co-worker must have an ide card installed in his machine if he is running more than 4 ide devices right?
It could be a number of factors, but I wouldn't say that the problem is from having 5 ide devices. It might be the configuration of the drives, the OS, driver problems, irq conflicts or a number of other things.
 
There shouldn't be any problems running 5 IDE devices, and obviously he must either a motherboard with 4 IDE ports or a PCI IDE card, otherwise he wouldn't be able to have 5 IDE devices.

So disregard everyone who said that he must have 3 IDE devices on one of the channels, thats bull.

Prob the OS, try Windows 2k, or maybe bad drivers or he did something that ucked up the computer, thats the most likely problems.

Time to Format! 🙂
 
I have been using 3 or 4 HD's and 2 cd-r units for a lont time on a Soyo 6ba+iv board with no problems at all. I have a 300 watt PS in the case.

no problems here
 
Well, I run 3 HDs, 1 CDRW, 1 DVD, with the Mobo's 2 ports and a Promise ATA 100 card. I suggest using an NT OS if he's not. I had some issues in 2000, but XP runs smooth.
 
Just a thought, but does the computer in question mix devices on the same IDE chain, such as a HD and burner? If that is the case, I would guess that would be the problem. Mixing dissimiliar devices can cause fast devices (ATA 100 hard drives) to work like slow devices (PIO 4 optical drives). This can be compounded by trying to burn a CD from a hard drive to the burner on the same chain.

Could you post a configuration of the drives, and their locations on the IDE chain(s)?
 
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