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Two IDE hard drives sharing one IDE channel ...

  • Thread starter Thread starter WT
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WT

WT

Diamond Member
I have two 320gb IDE drives that I'm putting into a build for use on an Asrock 775Dual-VSTA board. The board physically has two IDE channels obviously, but by using my 8800 GTS card with its very long length, it effectively blocks the secondary IDE channel.

I've ordered an SATA DVD/RW to deal with that (taking advantage of the 2 SATA ports on the board), but I am again stuck with TWO drives and only ONE IDE channel to plug them into.

I know this will hamper performance, but I am unsure how bad it will be. Question is - should I pull a drive and say the hell with it, or is there some reasonable workaround that I could try ?

I do have a Promise FasTrack ATA/100 controller, but this build is to test out Win 7, so drivers may not be available for the card to be able to boot the drives and install the OS. I could also scrap the 8800 GTS card and that solves my problem, but I really wanted to use the card in a build, otherwise its just sitting there collecting dust.
 
What exactly is the problem? Each ide channel can have 2 ide drives on it, unless you constantly read/write from both drives at the same time your performance should be fine.
 
If two drives are on the same cable, copying data from one to the other will be much much slower than otherwise.
 
unless you constantly read/write from both drives at the same time your performance should be fine.
Click to expand...

That was my question. I wasn't sure how big of a performance hit it would be, and what I typically do is use one drive to install Windows on and the second has all the games/media installed on that. I've never been stuck with a 'shared' channel before, so I'm just getting the info before I start installing the OS.

Thanks for any information as well, as I always find you guys have been a great source of hardware knowledge.
 
It'll be just fine, I used configurations like that for years and saw no problems for gaming, encoding, etc.

The only time it slows down noticeably is, like pointed out above, when you have to copy a large file/batch of files from one drive directly onto the other. Which doesn't happen often.
 
I say this is all pure baloney. The read and write rates are much slower than the transfer rates. Besides that new drives have huge Cache sizes. Might help to verify you are using DMA correctly in the highest mode. If you are copying data on one cable between 2 drives most of the traffic is one way.

I think the big issue is some motherboards do not have or poorly implement IDE on some motherboards and have switched the hardware implementation from IDE to SATA. So the specific motherboard you use may make a difference.

I say out with the old and in with the new.
 
I am officially curious if I could RAID0 these two drives and effectively increase the throughput. I had dabbled with RAID in my last build, so I've seen its benefits. No need to worry about data loss either, as my Windows Home Server has already proven its worth by recovering my array after a drive went bad.

Keep in mind this is for a Win7 beta testbed, so it won't connect to WHS either, but I have nothing to lose even if it does roll over and die at any point. My mind is officially off on a tangent at this point, but I enjoy learning something new from each build, so thanks again for the advice.
 
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