Hard drive bottleneck?

[DioCassius]

Will having a ata-33 harddrive as a backup drive (i.e. d: drive) slow down my system at all - except when accessing data on it?

 

[jimmygates]

Don't think so. I guess just don't have it on the same chain as your other faster harddrive. If I remember correctly, IDE only runs as fast as your slowest drive. Maybe I'm wrong...heh..hope this helps.


-Jimbo

 

[kwisatz]

You're partly correct jimmygates. The IDE standart can only read/write from one drive at a time. So if you are reading/writing to both drives on the same IDE channel the computer has to switch between the drives all the time, degrading performance. But that does not result in your faster drive running at your slower drives speed, only that it will be slowed down during haevy read/write on the slow drive.

Ultimately, this can be completely avoided if you put the slower disk om an other channel (cable) than the fast.

 

[IaPuP]

What he is asking- and he is correct in assuming,

If you plug an ATA-33 and an ATA-66 drive on the same cable, they will BOTH run at ATA-33 speed.

Eric

 

[kwisatz]

IaPuP>> That's true, but it does not matter much. Non of the IDE drive currently avaliable have a sustained transferrate above 33 MB/s. I actually got better performance using my onboard udma/33 controler with my IBM GXP75 drive instead of my HTP366 udma/66 card -ofcourse that just proves the low quality of the HTP drivers, but he shouldn't see more than a couple of percent speed diference between running the the new drive on udma/33 rather than udma/66,