Two HD's on same ide.. Bottlenecking?

[puching]

I have (or will have i should say) two Hd's on the same IDE cable. The slave is a 5gig ata33 and the master is a 30gig ata100. The 30 gig runs w2k and the 5 runs ME. my question is, does everything on the IDE cable bottleneck down to the speed of the slowest device, or can they run their respective speeds individually. The two drives do not share any information, all booting is down through bios settings. Thanks

 

[Zepper]

Some IDE adapters can treat each drive individually, but usually they aren't the ones included with a mobo. Check the specs on the Promise Ultra66 or 100. You might want to try one of these in any case as it adds two channels (four drives) on one IRQ, so you could have three IDE channels w/o using any more IRQs (disable one of the on-board). Most integrated adapters do throttle down to the slowest drive on the channel. OTOH, no IDE drive can really transfer data much faster than 35MB/sec anyway, so you might not be losing much. Test by attaching each drive separately and run some benchmarks, then put them on together and test again. Sisoft Sandra and HD Tach are simple tests you could use.
.bh.

 

[puching]

thank you so very much, your information is much appreciated!