Hard Drive.....Controller?

[ZachMarius]

I have been informed that there is a .....controller? I guess....... that allows you to use two IDE Hard Drives on the same port. It also allows faster accessing to both drives at the same time? Could anyone tell me what this product is so i can speed up my start up time? BTW I have a P4 2.4Ghz, 1532MB 2700RAM, One Seagate 120GB 7200Rpm, One Western Digital 100GB 5400Rpm, and running Win XP Home. Thanks for your help!
Chris

 

[huesmann]

Um, your mobo has two ports for IDE drives. You can put two drives on each port (channel). Drives communicating on the same port will be slowed down, drive communicating between different ports will not.

 

[helpmeout]

I use a Promise Ultra 133 controller card. I run both my HD's as "Master" from the controller and my CD-ROM and CD-RW both as "master" on the primary and secondary IDE connectors on the mobo. I rip a lot of music from vinyl, and have found this speeds things way up. HD's run at a higher DMA, and there is no slowdown transferring folders.

 

[ZachMarius]

I got one more question if someone wants to help out! How would I check out my PCI speed? Sandra and dxdiag won't

Thanks
Chris

 

[Steve]

The PCI bus has had a bandwidth of 133MBps for a long time, though in real life systems never use all that bandwidth due to overhead. Typical speeds max out at 100-120MBps.