Question about ATA33 device on same IDE chain as ATA66 device

[Lou3]

I'm about to buy a CD-RW, but I'm not sure how to arrange the IDE connection. The manufacturer, Acer, suggests that the CD-RW be set as the CD-ROM or DVD's slave. My DVD drive is ATA66, but the CD-RW is ATA33. If I set the DVD as master and CD-RW as its slave, will it cause a problem or impose any limitations on my DVD drive? Since I have two free IDE ports, should I just disregard Acer's advice and connect the CD-RW to one of these?

I hope I stated that clearly

 

[AndyHui]

The IDE Controllers in all modern chipsets support independent device timings, so putting an ATA33 device on the same cable as an ATA66 device will not hamper the performance of the ATA66 drive.

Normally CDRWs are recommended as Master devices for on-the-fly copying. Usually the probability of coasters with a slave CDRW is higher than as master (although I personally am somewhat skeptical of this on high-end systems).

There should be no problems setting the DVD to master and the CDRW to slave (my own set up is like this).

 

[Lou3]

Thanks for your reply. Now I have to find out if my chipset supports independent timing. I have an ASUS CUBX-E with a 440BX chipset and ATA100 support via an onboard Promise chip. I checked the user manual, but I didn't see any mention of independent timing. Does anybody know if the CUBX-E has this feature?

 

[Noriaki]

<< Thanks for your reply. Now I have to find out if my chipset supports independent timing. I have an ASUS CUBX-E with a 440BX chipset and ATA100 support via an onboard Promise chip. I checked the user manual, but I didn't see any mention of independent timing. Does anybody know if the CUBX-E has this feature? >>

The Promise Ultra100 certainly does.

I can't remember if the 440BX does or not, but since your DVD and Hard Drives will be slowed to ATA33 due to the controller not supporting higher it doesn't really matter in this circumstance.



One other caveat, IDT will make it fine to run an ATA33 and an ATA66 device on the same chain, but IDE is still piss poor at multitasking, so it won't be able to access both devices at the same time very well.

 

[ucla88]

<< One other caveat, IDT will make it fine to run an ATA33 and an ATA66 device on the same chain, but IDE is still piss poor at multitasking, so it won't be able to access both devices at the same time very well. >>



in fact, ide can't access both devices on a chain simultaneously under any circumstances.

while independent device timing will save you from problems within drives that are operating in different pio modes or different dma modes, one thing to note is that independent device timing will not allow a device operating in pio mode to run at the same time another one operates in dma mode. so, if you put an aging atapi device that doesn't support dma on the same channel as your udma100 hdd, guess what-it's all going to run pio.

you should be fine though as it's hard to buy a device nowdays that can't run in dma, unless you're scrounging through the goodwill bin.

p.s. i would be stunned if the bx chipset didn't support independent timing

 

[Lou3]

Thanks for the tech advice. Since I have two free IDE ports, I'll just give the CD-RW drive its own channel and sidestep the whole IDT thing.