How do you arrange your IDE devices?

[busmaster11]

What would you do if you have this setup?

Onboard ATA/100 controller only
1 ATA100 hd drive
1 ATA133 hd drive
1 PIO4 CDRW (I don't think my 12x10x32 Plextor supports UDMA)
1 UDMA DVD drive

I've heard that if you connect two atapi/CD drives to the same channel then they slow down during copying/etc, though mathematically that doesn't seem likely. I've also had a bad experience doing so.

I'm also under the impression if you put a slower device on the same channel as a faster one, say, an ATA100/133 device, the speed of the faster one will be bumped down to the speed of the slower one. How would you handle it to maximize throughput?

Lastly, I have an MSI K7t266-Pro2 board with a separate onboard RAID controller. I don't plan on doing raid, and I can't seem to get my drives detected on it if I don't do RAID, and ATAPI devices won't be detected on it at all. The chipset is a Promise lite something... If someone can help me figure out how to use it as an all purpose IDE controller that'd be helpful too.

Thanks.

 

[ku]

That's a tough one. If you have drives on the same channel and you want to copy something from it, it will slow it down (DVD and CD-RW). It's really up to you. You do HD+CDRW and then HD+DVD or HD+HD and CDRW+DVD. I personally would go with the HD+HD and CDRW+DVD because the optical drives won't slow down the hard drives.

 

[dcdomain]

I've also heard that connecting the IDE drives together slows down transfer between the drives because the computer can only access one drive on each channel at one time. So if that is true, any copying must first be taken from the harddrive in bits, stored in the ram and then transferred to the next drive right?

However, I've also heard that a faster drive will slow down to the speed of the slower drive on the same channel.

So which is right? For me, I arrange my drives according to the second point. On my RAID board (don't use RAID, just use it for the extra IDE channels, I've arranged it as follows.

First Controller:
Primary:
Master: Maxtor 40gb 7200rpm (OS drive)
Slave: none

Secondary:
Master: TDK VeloCD 12x10x32x
Slave: none

Second Controller:
Primary:
Master: Maxtor 80gb 5400rpm
Slave: Maxtor 80gb (Quantum) 5400rpm

Secondary:
Master: Maxtor 120gb 5400rpm
Slave: none

 

[exharr]

<< I've also heard that connecting the IDE drives together slows down transfer between the drives because the computer can only access one drive on each channel at one time. So if that is true, any copying must first be taken from the harddrive in bits, stored in the ram and then transferred to the next drive right?

However, I've also heard that a faster drive will slow down to the speed of the slower drive on the same channel.

So which is right? For me, I arrange my drives according to the second point. On my RAID board (don't use RAID, just use it for the extra IDE channels, I've arranged it as follows.

First Controller:
Primary:
Master: Maxtor 40gb 7200rpm (OS drive)
Slave: none

Secondary:
Master: TDK VeloCD 12x10x32x
Slave: none

Second Controller:
Primary:
Master: Maxtor 80gb 5400rpm
Slave: Maxtor 80gb (Quantum) 5400rpm

Secondary:
Master: Maxtor 120gb 5400rpm
Secondary: none >>


I believe both of those statements are correct. You are quite the maxtor man, aren't you?

 

[busmaster11]

Hmmm... just confirmed my suspicions then. Has anyone had any problems with copying from cd to cdrw on the same channel?

 

[exharr]

<< Hmmm... just confirmed my suspicions then. Has anyone had any problems with copying from cd to cdrw on the same channel? >>


I haven't. I've heard that most problems can be solved by slaving the cdrw.

 

[NeoMadHatter]

Master 1: 1 ATA100 hd drive
Slave 1: 1 ATA133 hd drive
Master 2: 1 UDMA DVD drive
Slave 2: 1 PIO4 CDRW (I don't think my 12x10x32 Plextor supports UDMA)

that's how i would set it up if it was me. if the cdrw was UMDA then i'd swap the Master2 and slave2.

 

[4824guy]

I would suggest putting each HD as a master, and slave the cd and cd-rw units.