single IDE port and multiple speed hard drives

[Deepness]

Hi guys,
I have a couple of questions about IDE and multiple hard drives. Please help. I searched and searched but only "pop-ups" and no answers. This one might be for all the gurus out there.

I have a pretty recent motherboard as a reference for all the following questions.

First, does it always have to be that the first connector on the IDE ribbon (first being the one closer to the IDE port) is the Primary/Master? (Primary and Master are synonymous right?)

Second, if I have a slower hard drive as the SLAVE and a faster one as the MASTER, then will that ribbon be limited by the slower one? For ex. if I have a 100kb/s hard drive as Primary and a 50kb/s as my secondary on the same IDE ribbon, then will the overall speed of the ribbon be only 50kb/s? How about if it is the other way around?

One last question, if I set the jumper on the hard-drive (it is Seagate) to select "cable-select" does that mean that it will select Primary/Secondary based on the position on the ribbon?

Thanks so much for helping me out with this. Thanks again.

deep.

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

First, if you set your hard drives to cable select, you want the drive on the farthest connector (the last one on the ribbon) to be the master, and the connector in the middle to be the slave.

If you're using a relativly new motherboard, your faster HD shouldn't be limited in speed by your slower one. From what I recall, newer IDE controllers aren't limited by having to select the lowest common denominator (PIO, UDMA1, etc.) on a channel.

Hope that helps.

 

[Duvie]

That is right....The newer faster drive will not be limited by the slower one....

Remember this though...When you do copying back and forth between the 2 drives it will effect speed as the ide drive can only do one read write operation at a time....So that being said, if you do a lot of transferring back and forth between the drives that may not be the optimal configuratio to have them both on the primary drive....