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quick questions about master/slave drive relationships

NuclearNed

NuclearNed

Raconteur
I think I know the answer, but would like some confirmation:

I have two drives on the same IDE cable. Both have their jumpers set for CS (cable select). My assumption is that this means that the drive on the terminating connector at the end of the cable is considered to be the "master", while the drive attached to the connector in the middle of the cable is the slave. Is that correct?

Is there any benefit to explicitely setting the jumpers so one is a master and the other slave, instead of using the cable select option?

Finally, will a drive have better performance if it is the master, as opposed to being the slave - even if the difference is just slight?
 
Originally posted by: NuclearNed
I think I know the answer, but would like some confirmation:

I have two drives on the same IDE cable. Both have their jumpers set for CS (cable select). My assumption is that this means that the drive on the terminating connector at the end of the cable is considered to be the "master", while the drive attached to the connector in the middle of the cable is the slave. Is that correct?
Click to expand...

Yes.

Is there any benefit to explicitely setting the jumpers so one is a master and the other slave, instead of using the cable select option?
Click to expand...

Not unless the drives are for some reason not configuring themselves properly. This was sometimes an issue with older drives (especially optical drives).

Finally, will a drive have better performance if it is the master, as opposed to being the slave - even if the difference is just slight?
Click to expand...

In theory, there may be a tiny amount of difference (with the master being slightly faster, since the slave's requests go through the master). In practice, no.

One thing that *was* sometimes a problem (but usually isn't anymore) was that if you slaved a faster device (say, an ATA100 hard drive) to a slower one (like an ATA33 optical drive), the fast device would be forced to run at the lower speed. Most newer optical drives handle this just fine, and you will not see the slave device lose bandwidth.
 
The one advantage to using M/S instead of CS is that position on the cable becomes irrelevant. Cable position with CS is hardwired. I pretty much use CS all the time except when the physical layout of the system necessitates the use of M/S.

A drawback of the 80-wire cables that are hardwired to CS is that you must plug the blue end into the mobo regardless of whether you are using CS or not. In the old days of 40-wire cables, it didn't matter what connector plugged where - I even plugged the middle connector into the mobo on occasion.

.bh.
 
Back before cable select I usually dressed up my slave drives in leather and spikes to tell which was which.

They seemed to like it.

-z
 
Originally posted by: zagood
Back before cable select I usually dressed up my slave drives in leather and spikes to tell which was which.

They seemed to like it.
Click to expand...
:thumbsup: did you play with Lemmiwinks too?
 
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