Father is an oldie

[SquishyWeasell]

Howdy, my father has been using comps for a while now and he says that its a "rule" to never have a cd drive on the same IDE channel as a hard drive.

I have never heard of this and am wondering if it is correct. Thx.

 

[Mavrick007]

It was a good idea in the past, but now with the channels being more independent,
it doesn't matter as much.

Rule of thumb, if you can put a drive on a separate channel, do so, but if you have alot of drives such as hard drives and optical drives, you might want to separate them according to function. An example would be copying from hard drive to hard drive or optical to optical. If that is the case I would probably set an optical and hard drive together on one channel and do the same on the secondary channel.

 

[Sheriff]

Cause your Father is an oldie he is or was correct. With the newer chipset there is no performance loss with them combined together nowadays...but there was a time

 

[SquishyWeasell]

thanks much, especially for the quick reply

 

[tomstevens26]

Originally posted by: Sheriff
Cause your Father is an oldie he is or was correct. With the newer chipset there is no performance loss with them combined together nowadays...but there was a time

I particularly remember it being an issue before CD writers starting using burnproofing technology. Seems like you were guaranteed to make a coaster if you had the HD w/ the data and the CD burner on the same channel.

Tom

 

[Maverick]

Originally posted by: tomstevens26

Originally posted by: Sheriff
Cause your Father is an oldie he is or was correct. With the newer chipset there is no performance loss with them combined together nowadays...but there was a time

I particularly remember it being an issue before CD writers starting using burnproofing technology. Seems like you were guaranteed to make a coaster if you had the HD w/ the data and the CD burner on the same channel.

Tom

I only remember it being an issue because of this IDE cd-burners not having a read buffer and having to worry about buffer underrun. Once burnproof came out this was a non issue. But back then it was recommended to get a SCSI cdr to avoid the problem.

I remember having a scsi burner with an UW scsi card for that reason alone.

 

[EeyoreX]

This can still be a problem if you optical drive is PIO (more and more rare, but they are out there). If you put a PIO mode only optical drive on the same channel as a DMA mode hard drive, the hard drive will slow to PIO mode speeds. So long as the hard drive and optical drive are both capable of (U)DMA mode, there is no problem with them operating on the same channel.

\Dan

 

[Cerb]

It used to be a problem. Newer chipsets and devices, however, have some magic of getting both devices running at their own DMA modes. Be sure to check and make sure they aren't stuck in PIO (try forcing DMA if they are), but with a new board, it aught to be OK.

 

[0roo0roo]

well optimally you'd have one drive per cable max. ide tends to slow on access for two drives on cable at the same time

 

[Mermaidman]

I believe it's best to have a CD-ROM drive on a separate IDE channel from the burner--for the times when you're burning straight from the CD (or DVD). So the best setup is:
Primary IDE: Main hard drive is master, read-only optical drive is slave
Secondary IDE: Burner is master.

Is this still true?

 

[corkyg]

Take it from another "oldie" - (going on 73!) - there are a lot of do's and don't's 10 to 20 years ago that no longer apply. But, I have retained one of those - an external burner is always more reliable than an internal one. I say that because of lots of coaster experience with a Pinnacle 2X burner - in fact, the best then was an external SCSI. So, since then (I remember when coasters were $3 each!) I have always used external burners. Now have three - all external Firewire - a derivative of SCSI.

Here's an aside for you - I have two sons - and until this past year, have built their computers as well as my own.

Cheers!