Understanding IDE

[Murphq]

I find IDE very confusing. In hte near future I will be building my first System.

Here are the IDE components

1 WD 80gig 7200rpm Boot drive
1 Maxtor 10gig 5400rpm media drive(mp3s)

1 Lite on CD burner
1 8x Dvd

Now I am unsure how to hook these up.

1. For example what should be on the same IDE cable.
2. What should be slave, and what should be master
3. Doesn't the 2 HD have to be on different cables so the 5400 doesn't slow down the 7200

Really confused

 

[dragonballgtz]

Primary Master: Fastest hard drive.
Primary Slave: DVD-ROM

Secondary Master: CD-RW
Secondary Slave: 2nd hard drive.

 

[Murphq]

Thanx, however will having the CDRW and the DVD on different IDEs, cause problems when buring cds "on the fly".

 

[Ghost]

This link has some handy info PCGuide

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: Murphq
I find IDE very confusing. In hte near future I will be building my first System.

Here are the IDE components

1 WD 80gig 7200rpm Boot drive
1 Maxtor 10gig 5400rpm media drive(mp3s)

1 Lite on CD burner
1 8x Dvd

Now I am unsure how to hook these up.

1. For example what should be on the same IDE cable.
2. What should be slave, and what should be master

That depends on the task(s) to be performed. But in general the best setup is:

Primary Master - WD 80GB (Boot and every day apps)
Primary Slave - LiteOn CD Burner (Backups, Archiving, CD Copying)
Secondar Master - Maxtor 10GB (mp3s, seldom used apps, etc....)
Secondary Slave - DVD (CD Audio source, Software installation source, etc....)

Assuming the following things:
i) You'll usually install software from the DVD drive to your primary.
ii) You'll usually burn from either the secondary HD or DVD drive.

3. Doesn't the 2 HD have to be on different cables so the 5400 doesn't slow down the 7200[/quote] No. almost all modern motherboards support independant device timing, meaning as long as you use a ATA66 cable even if one of the drives is only ATA33 each device will run at it's best speed. The only exception would be if you have a Optical drive that still uses PIO mode.

Thanx, however will having the CDRW and the DVD on different IDEs, cause problems when buring cds "on the fly".

No. Only one device on a IDE channel (cable) can "talk" at a time so if they're on seperate channels (cables) then you get:
read - write
instead of:
read - buffer - write
(as you would if they were on the same channel)

Thorin