Primary, Secondary, Master, Slave, Bewilderment

[Caveman]

Just got the parts for the system below and am eager to put it together today. As far as the storage devices go, I assume that my Hard drive goes by itself on the primary connector and that I should set the Master on the other (secondary IDE connection) as the DVD Rom w/ the slave as the CDRW burner...

Perhaps this is a dumb querry, but I've been out of the computer scene long enough that my last machine just had a CD reader and this is my first attempt at building my own rig... Please help.

Whats the best configuration for Master/Slave Primary/Secondary allocation for the storage devices?

 

[Namuna]

Here's my Suggestion:
Primary Master = Hard Drive
Primary Slave = DVD Drive

Secondary Master = CDRW Drive

It's really a toss-up as to which channel to slave the DVD drive, but you definitely want the HD and CDRW to be Masters.

 

[Caveman]

Why? Not that I don't trust you but I just talked to another computer guru and he recommended the same setup as you but with the DVDRom drive as the master on the secondary and the burner on the same channel as a slave...

Ideas?

 

[RC5Bri]

My current setup is:

Primary Master: HD
Primary Slave: None

Secondary Master: DVD
Secondary Slave: CDRW

I believe the manual for my cdrw(HP) even suggested setting it as a slave. Although, any setup will probably work decently.

 

[Bovinicus]

Not to burst your bubble or anything, but I really don't think it matters at all. I would just try and leave your harddrive on it's own channel. Even if it wasn't in that config, it really doesn't matter. I recently moved my CD-RW and HDD onto to same chain because I wanted to eliminate some clutter from my case. The performance has not changed one spec, even with a 2MB buffer on my HDD and pretty high burst transfer speeds.

 

[techwanabe]

Here's my rig:

Primary Master: C:\hard drive
Primary Slave: D:\hard drive
Secondary Master: CDROM
Secondary Slave: CDRW

Works fine.

 

[PlatinumGold]

put opticals on separate channel from hd. if you put either of the optical drives on same channel as HD, everytime the hd is accessed it will also check your optical drive. it is really annoying. it was for me anyway.

some people say you should put cd rw and dvd on separate channels for when you copy cd to cd. but i always copy cd to hd and hd to cd rw so it was never an issue for me.

 

[thorin]

<< Primary Master = Hard Drive
Primary Slave = DVD Drive
Secondary Master = CDRW Drive >>


"Why? Not that I don't trust you but I just talked to another computer guru and he recommended the same setup as you but with the DVDRom drive as the master on the secondary and the burner on the same channel as a slave..."

For performance reasons (due to the desgn of the IDE interface/bus) it is best to have source and destination drives on different channels. So copying from your Primary channel to your secondary will result in the best performance.

However along the same lines since you install things from CDROM (DVD) to your HD then having your CDROM (DVD) on a seperate channel from your HD is also beneficial. You just have to decide which is going to happen more often:

1) Burning CDs from your HD and copying CDs (from DVD to Burner)
2) Reading from your CDROM (DVD) to your HD.

Thorin