Need Hard Drive Placement Advice!

[scarfase99]

Ok, here's my current setuP:
Athlon XP 2000+ on Gigabyte GA-7DX
on IDE1 - 40gb Maxtor (primary OS) & 80gb Seagate (slave)
on IDE2 - Plextor 48X CDRW (primary) & Generic DVD-Rom Drive (slave)

Now, transfering stuff is pretty slow, and i was told by a friend that the reason it's slow is because both hard drives are on the same IDE Channel. Is this true?

Also, what would be the best arrangement with these drives? (40 & Dvd ; 80 & CD-rw?)

 

[Souka]

Only 1 HD has control of the IDE channel at a time (master or slave dosen't make a difference)........so it's best to put HD's on different channels if possible.

The setup you mentioned "(40 & Dvd ; 80 & CD-rw?) " would be better than what you have.


Put the CD-RW on a different channel than the HD you're going to be buring from.......


Also, I would possibly recommend making your 80GB drive the primary HD as the boot drive as I would "assume" the 80gb is faster of the two....or at least make the 80gb the primary app/data drivve.

 

[scarfase99]

ok, i'll try that out. but before i do, how much work is going to be involved? Will drive letters change? any affect on OS?

 

[Zepper]

For best performance, buy a two channel add-on ATA100 or 133 adapter so you can put all of your drives on their own channels. Ones with Silicon Image chipsets are very cheap. Also look in "For Sale/Trade" section here. There are usually a few available there. Oh, I almost forgot, put your HDs on the add-on card as they are usually faster than the on-board controllers
.bh.

 

[TheCorm]

I wouldn't recommend running CD drives and hard drives on the same channel, I think you will find it even slower, especially when burning CD's or watching DVD's.....it may even cause lockups when burning in some cases....

Getting extra IDE ports is generally the best idea if you are unhappy with the speed.

On a personal note....can you use cheap ATA133 raid cards to just provide an extra 2 IDE channels? I have been having trouble, I just had 1 hard drive attached to 1 channel but had trouble seeing any drive letters, it was al partitioned OK, using NTFS and running W2k.

Cheers,

Corm

 

[Souka]

Hmm.....CD on HD channel slows things down? Explain why please.

also, if any of you guys are dead set on adding an IDE controller, I have a Promise ATA-100 Add-on PCI card I would be glad to sell cheap.

The card adds two IDE channels (so you can add upto 4 devices) to any PCI system running Win98 or better. This IDE card is convertable to an IDE RAID card with a simple soder job. I'm lousy at sodering so I didn't even attempt it, but there's plenty of how-to's out there.

Also, this is an ATA-100 card......don't waste your money on ATA-133 as the bandwidth is NOT needed by todays IDE drives.....heck, even in RAID config, IDE drive throughput is still around ATA-66.....

PM me if interested in card.

 

[Zepper]

To The Corm et al.,
Yes, the cheap ATA RAID cards can be used for just for two more ATA channels. Just disable the RAID function in the board's BIOS setup routine. All of the recent Silicon Image boards are combo cards. Some of the others can only support hard drives but the SI can support any type of IDE drive when operating as an ordinary ATA controller.
.bh.