HDD and Burner on the same Channel cause problems or slowdowns?

[R2D2]

I'm ordering the Asus P4S8X which only has one IDE channel (I don't have a serial ATA Hard Drive yet, and probably won't until the 2nd gen faster interface drives are out).

So my HDD and my Burner are going on the same IDE channel. Will this cause problems or slow down the Burning process? (ripping CD's isn't at issue here).

Along the same lines, will just plain reading CD's be slower too?

Any thoughts?

 

[ViRGE]

Yes and yes.

With the drives on the same channel, it's an either/or situation, as only 1 drive can be using the channel at any given moment. The problem shouldn't be too bad, but you may have to slow the burner down, and not do anything else with the machine while it's burning, as the HD is the master, so it will take priority over the burn.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

so what would be the optimal setup for someone with 1 DVD drive, 1 CDRW, and 1 HDD? I'm guessing to put both optical drives on the same channel and then have the harddrive by itself.

 

[ViRGE]

Correct. If/when worse comes to worse and you want to do a CD-CD copy, you can still hold the image over on the HD for the burn --and realisticly, a CD-CD copy should still work fine; the CD won't need to be accessed for trivial tasks like the HD is when a user wants to do something else durring the burn.

 

[R2D2]

On my current machine, my HDD is Master on Primary IDE. My DVD is Master on the Secondary IDE, and my Burner is Slave on the Secondary.

I don't Rip disks directly from DVD to Burner, so having them both on the same IDE isn't a problem. They are both UDMA, which is nice.

---------------
This new Asus board with the Promise Serial ATA controller only appears to have one parallel IDE channel (for those REAL OLD UDMA/133 drives). Until Serial ATA HDD's come out, this machine would need to put the HDD as Master, and Burner as slave. (doesn't look like too good a solution to me!)

However I've always kept the HDD's on the primary, and put the optical drives on the secondary, as a rule. So I'm not 100% sure how they would interact being on the same channel.

Whew, this is like the Tower of Babble!

 

[R2D2]

Would I be better off temporarily installing a PCI card Hard Drive controller? Hate to spend the money, but with Serial ATA drives still a ways away...

Can anyone recommend one?
The HDD in question is a Maxtor 80GB UDMA/133.

 

[lupohki]

I have a Lite-On 16x dvd and 48x cd-r on the same channel, and I can do CD to CD copies.

 

[ViRGE]

R2D2, if you have a burner that has some sort of underrun protection, you should be ok. If not, you're just going to have to try and see what happens.

 

[R2D2]

Thanks ViRGE, lupo'

I have the Sony 40-12-48 black (it's been flawless), and it has underrun protection.

Do you think I should put the HDD on the PCI controller card, or the burner?

 

[ViRGE]

If you do get a controller card, put the HD on it. The logic behind this is simply because these controller cards are meant for hard drives, they don't support the Periphal Interface extentsion to ATA(ATAPI), so most CD writers/readers won't work on those cards.

 

[R2D2]

Thanks again ViRGE.

Asus doesn't have a manual online yet for this Mobo, so all the info I'm reading is piecemeal.

I'm hoping that I can enable/disable the on-board Promise serial ATA controller, and thus use both of the on-board ATA/133 channels (problem solved). But I don't know for sure, since the board is so new.

A PCI controller is the backup plan. Well, I'm 99% sure I'm gonna order the board on Monday, along with a P4 2.53GHz, and a 512MB stick of Corsair XMS PC3200 (2-3-3-6-T1) to run at PC2700.

Wish me luck,
R2 🙂

 

[Bovinicus]

No, you should be fine. It is theoretically better to put them on separate channels, but in real world applications you won't find any difference. In fact, my DVD-ROM and CD-RW are on the same channel and I copy on the fly from one to the other while doing things on my computer without the assisstance of Burn-Proof technology of any kind. Don't worry about it.