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To many Hard-drives ????

T

thuffner3

Member
I currently have three hard-drives and one cd-cdrw hooked up to the IDE controllers (2)
My primary HD and secondary are on one and one older -w- the CDRW on the other.
Would I do well to add a controller card for two of these devices so they have there own?
 
Unless your doing something very hard drive intensive and you want to offload some cpu cycles to the extra contoller, or you want to add more drives, I wouldn't think it's worth it. It might be an interesting project to try and run some bench marks though.
 
The transfer of files from one hard disk to the other runs at less than half the speeds its capable of when the drives are on the same cable. Controller cards are very cheap and the performance will improve across all the drives. Why wouldn't he want to take advantage of it?
 
The transfer of files from one hard disk to the other runs at less than half the speeds its capable of when the drives are on the same cable.
Click to expand...

That may have been the case in the Pentium 1 days...but with todays hardware, that is almost all but gone.

You will find that that particular IDE channel will only work as fast as the slowest device on that chain. But as you say the older HDD is on the same chain as the CDRW, you're as fast as you can be under these conditions.

If you wanted to add more drives, or aleviate "any" slowness your system encounters, it can only help😉

Edblor
 
The problem of transferring files between devices on the same chain is still an issue. Both drives will share the total bandwidth of the channel. In the case of the CDRW and the hard drive, if he burns an image off the hard drive on the chain, its speed degradation is VERY noticeable.

Even worse CD burning performance; when burning from one CDROM to the CDRW on the same channel.

Anytime both drives on the channel are being accessed at the same time, a large performance hit will arise.
 
I would definitely try to have each IDE drive on its own channel for optimum performance. Excellent IDE controllers that can handle any IDE drive from the very slow like an LS-120 to the fastest of the current hard drives are the SiliconImage based cards. It can also do RAID if that is something you might be interested in for the future. Check out the Syba at dealsonic.com for $20.45 shipped. Or you can get a nearly identical unit with the LSI Logic name on it for about $60. shipped.
.bh.
 
Well, it's simple mathematics. You have 4 devices with 4 channels available, you might as well put each on a separate channel. It really doesn't matter what you're using them for.
 
The problem of transferring files between devices on the same chain is still an issue. Both drives will share the total bandwidth of the channel. In the case of the CDRW and the hard drive, if he burns an image off the hard drive on the chain, its speed degradation is VERY noticeable.

Even worse CD burning performance; when burning from one CDROM to the CDRW on the same channel.

Anytime both drives on the channel are being accessed at the same time, a large performance hit will arise.
Click to expand...
This is true. Having said that, it is still mostly not an issue. The maximum bandwidth of an ATA100 controller is 100 MB/s. An ATA100 hard drive can not fill that 100MB/s, simply due to physical limitations of the drive. Most optical drives operate at a max of ATA33. That leaves 67MB/s for other drives on the chain. Pushing 67MB/s is near impossible with current modern hard drives, even in an IDE RAID configuration. You will notice little, if any "real" increase in speeds. Get the controller if you need to add more IDE devices.

\Dan

 
Originally posted by: EeyoreX
The problem of transferring files between devices on the same chain is still an issue. Both drives will share the total bandwidth of the channel. In the case of the CDRW and the hard drive, if he burns an image off the hard drive on the chain, its speed degradation is VERY noticeable.

Even worse CD burning performance; when burning from one CDROM to the CDRW on the same channel.

Anytime both drives on the channel are being accessed at the same time, a large performance hit will arise.
Click to expand...
This is true. Having said that, it is still mostly not an issue. The maximum bandwidth of an ATA100 controller is 100 MB/s. An ATA100 hard drive can not fill that 100MB/s, simply due to physical limitations of the drive. Most optical drives operate at a max of ATA33. That leaves 67MB/s for other drives on the chain. Pushing 67MB/s is near impossible with current modern hard drives, even in an IDE RAID configuration. You will notice little, if any "real" increase in speeds. Get the controller if you need to add more IDE devices.

\Dan
Click to expand...

Once you add any device that uses ATA33, the other drive on the chain is forced to use the same speed. In which case its not an ATA100 being shared but instead its ATA33 being shared. Thats the sacrifice of backwards compatibility.
 
Dan, although what you say makes sense. You really need to do a real world benchmark.

You are arguing with someone who said:

Burn from CD to CD on same channel. Or burn from hard drive to CD on same channel.

Now compare that to burning either on different channels.

Now ocme back, and repeat the numbers - I dare ya.
 
Once you add any device that uses ATA33, the other drive on the chain is forced to use the same speed. In which case its not an ATA100 being shared but instead its ATA33 being shared. Thats the sacrifice of backwards compatibility.
Click to expand...
If you use the proper cables (ie 80 ribbon cable) you can mix ATA33 and up drives without a problem. Modern IDE controllers support independent reading of each device, so the ATA33 drive will read at its max speed, as will the ATA100 drive. Try it out. If you put an ATA33 and ATA100 drive on the same 80 ribbon cable Windows XP will report one device using UDMA2 and the other UDMA5. Test performance if you like, it will be the same either way if using the proper cable.

Dan, although what you say makes sense. You really need to do a real world benchmark.

You are arguing with someone who said:

Burn from CD to CD on same channel. Or burn from hard drive to CD on same channel.

Now compare that to burning either on different channels.

Now ocme back, and repeat the numbers - I dare ya.
Click to expand...
I am going to decline your dare. Why? Because frankly, benchmarks don't mean jack sh!t to me. Regular use is the only "real worl benchmark" that matters to me. I use my computers both ways, and there is no noticable difference in my view. When I make backup CDs on my file server box. The CD-ROM and CD-RW are on the same channel, CD-ROM is master, and CD-RW slave. My times are about a minute, minute and-a-half slower than doing a CD to CD copy on my main rig. The main rig has each optical drive on a seperate channel. Of course, I will also mention the main rig has a 48x burner while the file server has a 32x burner. That might account for some of the difference... It was different when ATA33/66 was the norm, this isn't the case with modern drives. Also, I apologize for failing to be more clear. I said
You will notice little, if any "real" increase in speeds.
Click to expand...
That implied benchmarks may show a difference. But those few seconds are hardly critical. I should have been more clear.

\Dan

 
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