IDE Cable master or slave positions?

[FACTION95Si]

Does it matter which drive you plug into the slots on an IDE cable? Does the Master have to be on the end and the slave in the middle?

 

[crasher88]

yes it does matter

say for example you put your harddrive with your os on your slave and have another harddrive for storing data, the computer would automaticly look at the master drive not the slave

so yes it does matter to an extent but if your building a new comptuer from scratch with totaly new componets it really doesn't matter

 

[DS1MCSE]

<< say for example you put your harddrive with your os on your slave and have another harddrive for storing data, the computer would automaticly look at the master drive not the slave >>


What you're referring to is an incorrect Master/Slave setting on the hard drive. The question was whether or not it mattered which IDE port on the cable each is plugged into. The answer to this is no. There are only two times when this is a consideration. The first is if you're using Cable Select verses Master/Slave. The second is if you only have a single device on the cable. In this scenario, you should use the connector on the end of the cable.

 

[FACTION95Si]

So your saying if you only have one drive that your going to plug into a 2 port ide cable then you want to plug it into the end port. So then looking at this from a performance point of view, wouldn't I want my master drive(drive with OS on it) plugged into the end port on the ide cable? Would the computer look at that end port first or give it priority before communicating with the middle port on the ide cable?

 

[THUGSROOK]

it doesnt matter which plug you use.
on a single drive i use the 1st plug and cut the rest off for neatness.

 

[mechBgon]

You notice on SCSI cables that the drives are added starting as close as possible to the terminator, which is at the far end of the cable. I'm not an expert on SCSI, but I believe that is to prevent signal bounce on the tail end of the cable as much as possible.

With IDE, I would put the fastest drive on the end of the cable so there is no signal bounce due to vacant cable beyond it. This might be one of the reasons that IDE cables are "officially" not supposed to be over 18 inches long.

Realistically, however, I have run enough HD Tach benchmarks to conclude that it's not really making any difference on an 18" IDE cable, no matter where the HDD is plugged in. With longer IDE cables, I don't know, but there are situations where 18" is not really enough. Maybe Serial ATA will help with that problem, whenever it arrives in mainstream products.

 

[DS1MCSE]

Yes, that's the idea. In a single drive scenario, you want the drive on the end terminal to terminate it to prevent any signal bounce back.

In a dual-drive scenario, it simply doesn't matter. There is no performance difference.

 

[nnnyyy]

On the harddrive itself, should the jumpers be on master,slave, or cable? I always had them in master/slave but recently I have heard that they should be on cable select.

 

[DS1MCSE]

Master/Slave. Most IDE cables don't support the cable select mode anymore.

 

[Zap]

ATA66/100/133 IDE cables _do_ support cable select. Try it sometime. Get two hard drives set on cable select and connect them. The HDD at the end will always detect as master, and the one in the middle as slave.
_____________________
|_____________|_______|
^ ^ ^
motherboard slave master

One time I didn't need such a long ATA100 cable, and cut the motherboard side off:
_______
|______|
^ ^
slave master

I hooked up one end to the motherboard and the second to the HDD, and the BIOS reported some error.