Need help on installing a hd and cdrom

[cyberock]

I'm installing a harddrive and a cd rom on my computer. The cdrom is set to be the slave and the harddrive is the master. Does it matter which part of the cable I plug it into? Is the slave suppose to go on the end and the master in the middle of the cable? Thanks!

 

[cholley]

i prefer not to slave anything to the hard drive

 

[cyberock]

well, I was told not to put two cdrom on the same cable so that's why I'm slaving it to the harddrive.

 

[cholley]

i run my cd-r as secondary master and cdrom as secondary slave, it's no problem putting 2 cdroms on same channel
cdroms are slow in comparison to modern hard drives and the ide channel will run at the speed of the slowest device

 

[Maggotry]

Originally posted by: cholley
i run my cd-r as secondary master and cdrom as secondary slave, it's no problem putting 2 cdroms on same channel
cdroms are slow in comparison to modern hard drives and the ide channel will run at the speed of the slowest device

So are you trying to say that an ATA133 HD will run at ATA33 if it's on the same IDE channel as an optical drive? That's very not true anymore.

The IDE device will run at whatever speed it is regardless of what else is attached to the same channel. The master goes at the end of the cable and the slave in the middle. What kind of IDE set-up do you have? Just make sure the jumper is in the right place.

The deal with drives on the same channel is this: only one can read/write at a time. So if you want to install software, for example, use a drive on another channel. That way the secondary can read the data from the CD while the primary simultaneously writes it to the HD. If you install from the slave/primary, the computer will read data from the CD, then write the data to the HD as opposed to doing it on the fly as it would if they were on different channels. Basically, if they're on the same channel, only one at a time can be accessed.

 

[cyberock]

Thanks M, that was the exact answer I was looking for!