Questions about IDE port speed

teddymines

Senior member
Jul 6, 2001
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If I have a new ATA/100 and and older ATA/33 hard drive on the same IDE port, will the overall port speed be lowered to support the slower drive? I ask this because I have a 60gxp and a very old (10yr) 220mb drive on the same ide port. Even if I don't access the slower drive, will the faster one slow down simply because a slower device shares the bus?

Also, both my cdrom and burner are on the same bus, and they are very old. The cdrom is at least 6 years old and the burner is about 2. Because of their slower performance, they both work fine on the same bus. Could speed limitations because of their age affect devices on the other IDE bus, or are the two buses independent when it comes to speed?

I'm running windows 2000 sp2 if that matters. Thanks.
 

Pariah

Elite Member
Apr 16, 2000
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Why don't you get rid of the 220MB drive? So long as it isn't being used at the same time as the GXP, it shouldn't affect the speed of the GXP. Being 220MB and 10 years old, it's not UDMA33, in fact I don't know what that would be as it predates ATA-1 which was released in 1994.
 

redhatlinux

Senior member
Oct 6, 2001
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Try doing a search on 'Independant Device Timing', seem to remember storagereviw.com had an article. Newer chipsets (+/- 4 years old) all support this feature which allows fast and slow drives to run at the max speeds without slowing down the faster drive.
 

teddymines

Senior member
Jul 6, 2001
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Good point. I use it to hold all my latest driver and app downloads so if I have to reinstall 98se or 2000 I will have it all available. I guess I could burn all that to a CD.