how to connect 2 cddrives, 2 hard drives?

[broshiggie]

Hey all, i have an asus p4b533 and i was wondering how to connect my ide devices. I have a 40gb 7200 hd, 120 gb 7200 hd (movies, mp3s, etc), DVD drive, and CDRW drive. Running windoze xp.

I was under the assumption that it does not matter how you hook up your devices, that they will all transfer data at the same speed regardless of slave/master settings. Now i am hearing that hard drives should get a dedicated IDE channel to maximize performance. I think i have an old ata-33 pci card lying around somewhere, so would i see noticeable performance gains if i put a single HD on each mobo channel, and put my cdrw and dvd drive on the pci channel?

Also i was reading through windows help that XP can only handle 4 ide devices at a time. If i wish to add a 3rd HD, how would i do this?

Thanks for your help!

 

[stevewm]

It does not matter how they are hooked up.

Though most people put the hardrives on one channel, and the opticals on the other. Since in most computer cases the hardrives are mid-way down the case with the opticals at the very top. Hooking them up in this arrangement is the most logical way to do it....

 

[charlie21]

I would just attach everything to the onboard IDE. You would get negligable performance gains by giving each drive a seperate channel.

 

[andyfasthands]

it does matter. for example, if you have a hard drive hooked up slave or master on the same ribbon as an optical drive, when you put in a cd, the hard drive processes may lock up as the drive initially reads the cd data. abit mentions something about this in their mobo manuals, as doing so would affect the "integrity" of your system.

hook up the hard drives master-slave on an ata100-or-133 ribbon, and optical drives optical-slave run on ata33, so any ribbon will work.

 

[charlie21]

Oops, oh yeah, definately HDD's on one channel and opticals on the other. Just like andyfasthands described above.

 

[andyfasthands]

sorry, misread the question.. hehhe. i'm not sure about dedicated ide for hd's. sounds logical, but i doubt it would have a noticeable impact on performance since HD transfers flutter around ~50mb transfers...room for both along an ata100 ribbon.

 

[jvang125]

it does make a difference. actually a huge difference. i once had a HD and cd-rom on the same channel. whenever i installed software from the cd onto the HD, the install would take forever to finish. 10-15mins just to install a 1 disc game. i then set each drive to it's own ide controller and now it's a lot quicker...1-2mins for software installations.

in your case, connect both HDs to the same ide and the cd drives onto the other ide. i currently have mine set up that way and everything runs great.

 

[Matt84]

The best way for a single controller is to hook up hdds on one channel and optical drives on another. Also never mix drives with PIO and UDMA otherwise the UDMA drive will revert back to PIO for some reason.

One exception is a UDMA DVD drive and I noticed no slowdowns when I chained it to a hdd. Mind u I never installed software from that DVD drive to the HDD is was chained to so if you did that it could slow down. At the moment my new systems got an onboard promise controller which has worked wonders for cross drive file transfer speeds. If you do this then u might want to put your optical drives on the PCI card. My current config is

Intel Channel 1 - 40GB UDMA5 boot drive / no slave
Intel Channel 2 - 20GB UDMA4 drive / Pioneer 16x DVD UDMA4

Promise Channel 1 - 80GB UDMA5 / no slave
Promise Channel 2 - CD-RW PIO4 / no slave

The bonus of this setup means copying from anywhere exept between 20gb drive and DVD is at full speed. Note that because the dvd and the 20gb drive are UDMA 4 there is no slowdown for any devices on this channel. I've deliberately kept nothing chained to my CD-RW because any device attached would be forced to work at PIO4 regardless of what the device supports.

If you were to add the PCI ATA/33 card you could set up as following:

Intel Channel 1 - 40GB / no slave (you could add a slave hdd here later)
Intel Channel 2 - 120GB / no slave (you could add a slave hdd here later)

PCI ATA/33 Channel 1 - DVD / no slave
PCI ATA/33 Channel 2 - CD-RW / no slave (don't add a slave at all here)

Windows XP along with 98SE support more than 4 ide devices. my config has 5 with a DVD-+RW soon to be added which will give me a total of 6. You shouldn't have too much trouble

 

[broshiggie]

thanks for the replies all. I cant find my pci ata33 card so i will most likely have:

channel 1 with 40gig master/120 gig slave
channel 2 with cdrw master/ dvd slave

I sure hope that adding a dvd-rw in the future will not be a problem. I had a problem with win2k, in which it will not recognize more than 2 ide devices. I had win98se previously, and had 2 optical drives on 1 channel and a hard drive on a second channel. When i upgraded to win2k, i could not recognize one of the optical drives. After running through the windows 2k help, it says it cannot recognize more than 2 ide devices... anyone got any ideas on how i can get it to recognize my current setup (2 optical + 1 hd) and an additional HD? The mobo comes with 2 channels