What IDE Setup (Primary & Secondary Master/Slave) Is Best For Optimum Performance.

[Dan]

Here's my current arrangement:

Primary Master: Western Digital 20GB ATA-66 HDD
Primary Slave: CDR/RW, 4x4x24
Secondary Master: CDR, 50x

This arrangement works but is it the best way to have the drives set up? Would another configuration yield better performance?

 

[sciencewhiz]

If you have an ATA66 controller, then you might see a slight speed difference in speed if you keep only ATA66 devices on the primary chanel.

Each channel chooses the fastest protocol that all devices on that channel support. CD-ROMs don't support ATA66 so you are running you hard-drive in ATA33 mode right now. The reason that I say slight is that few drives availible now use more than a 33 mb/sec transfer rate.

If you do a lot of copying of CDs from CD to CD then you will be much better served by leaving the configuration like you have it now, with the 2 CD drives on seperate channels.

 

[Dan]

Thanks for your response. I have an ATA-66 controller but I also do a lot of CD-burning. Sounds as if I'd best leave the configuration as is.

 

[jmorrell]

Best to put your CDRW as Master on the secondary IDE channel. Because you have it on the same IDE channel as your hard drive, you are slowing down your CD writing as only one device can use a channel at a time. Put your CDROM as the secondary slave.

 

[Dan]

After looking at the benchmarks for my hard drive I put the CDR-W on the Secondary IDE as a slave. My benchmarks on the C partition nearly doubled to 7268. Partitions D & E are 14093 and 14387 respectively while F is 12103.

Here's another factor though. When I burn CD's it's almost always from CD-to-CD. How does that affect the way things should be set up?