Faster xfer rate: Hard drives on same ide channel or on different IDE channels?

[JEDI]

i just used GHOST disk-to-disk to copy everything over from my 20gig to my new 60 gig hd. it was on the same ide chan. xfer rate was 1/2 gig per min.

just wondering if i put the 60 gig as master on ide2, will the xfer rate be faster?

 

[AU Tiger]

I have no facts to support my beliefs, but I always have felt that my drives perform better when they are on separate IDE channels. The way I figure it is that if the drives are on separate channels then the writing to one drive does not affect the read performance of the other.

 

[thorin]

Yes the performance will improve (slightly) if the drives are on seperate channels.

Thorin

 

[techfuzz]

Yes it will be faster if you put them on seperate channels. The IDE spec only allows for 1 device to be accessed at any given moment on each channel.

techfuzz

 

[Medellon]

I agree, putting your hard drives on seperate IDE channels will help performance slightly. Unfortunately my new mobo only has 2 IDE channels and I'm not able to do this anymore

 

[JEDI]

thx..it took ~40 min to xfer all 20 gigs. was just curious if it was worth the effort to unplug the cdrom drives on ide2 to save a few min?

my understanding is that if there is a slower device on the same ide chan, the both master and slave devices will operate at the slower device speed. Or does that not matter when using a Dos Bootdisk, and using GHOST?

 

[EdipisReks]

Originally posted by: XFILE
my understanding is that if there is a slower device on the same ide chan, the both master and slave devices will operate at the slower device speed.

i believe that while that used to be true, it no longer is.

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: EdipisReks

Originally posted by: XFILE
my understanding is that if there is a slower device on the same ide chan, the both master and slave devices will operate at the slower device speed.

i believe that while that used to be true, it no longer is.

I also believe that was true, but no longer. Each device will run at its highest speed while connected to the same IDE channel, but the lowest speed device will not cause the higher speed device to run at its speed.

techfuzz

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: XFILE
thx..it took ~40 min to xfer all 20 gigs. was just curious if it was worth the effort to unplug the cdrom drives on ide2 to save a few min?

You're not going to get much better than @ 40 min to copy 20GB. It takes us here at work about 20-25 minutes to ghost 4-6GB from one computer over a 100mbit isolated network to our ghost server. I doubt it's worth the effort to unplug devices just to save a couple of minutes at most.

techfuzz

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: techfuzz

Originally posted by: EdipisReks

Originally posted by: XFILE
my understanding is that if there is a slower device on the same ide chan, the both master and slave devices will operate at the slower device speed.

i believe that while that used to be true, it no longer is.

I also believe that was true, but no longer. Each device will run at its highest speed while connected to the same IDE channel, but the lowest speed device will not cause the higher speed device to run at its speed.

techfuzz

Yes & No. Most modern motherboard support independant device timings so both drives should be able to run at their best speeds. However if one of the devices is running in PIO Mode then independant device timing is not supported.

Thorin

 

[teckmaster]

I use ghost quite often where I work. Not much of a speed gain with it using 1 channel or both. In normal operation, they should run faster if on separate channels. But a drive will only go as fast as the slowest on the chain. So if you have a cd-rom and an ATA-100 Hard Drive, its onyl gonna want to run at 33.

 

[WyteWatt]

If you had four of those of those Seagate 15.3K 15,000 rpm 72 gig SCSI HDs or four of those new Maxtor 15,000 rpm HDs, which are in some tests equal and faster than the Seagate 15.3K 15,000 rpm SCSI HD, would that speed up backing up data from one HD to the other for backup in Ghost? Guessing yes but how much less time would it take to transfer lets say 20 gigs?