What is the best way to install a pair of optical drives?

[Mudbone]

I have an Asus A8N SLI, AOpen 1648/AAP(ROM), NEC ND-3520A (Burner), HD is SATA. Just to be clear the A8N has a Primary and Secondary IDE connector. What is the best way to configure the optical drives? Have both on one IDE cable or each on a separate cable? If on one cable, which should be master and which slave? If on separate cables is there a difference between the primary and secondary connector?

 

[OverVolt]

I would just use an ATA33 cable (but it doesnt matter) and just use the secondary IDE and put both drives on the same cable. I would do the ROM as master and the burner as the slave.

Theoretically the master gets first dibs on resources, but your probably not going to notice any difference what-so-ever.


So the bottom line is: however you want to do it.

 

[Mudbone]

Why the secondary? (Keep in mind my HD isn't going on the IDE cable)

 

[boyRacer]

Put them both as Master on each channel if you don't have anything else to put in there. 🙂

 

[imported_Twitch]

I would put each optical drive on their own cable so they don't share the bandwidth of one cable.

(You probably won't be doing direct copies from one disc to another, but if you wanted to burn 2 discs at once or just use both at the same time... I would think it is just personal preference to which drive goes on the primary/secondary connector (But for kicks I'd use the Burner on the primary connector)

 

[Mudbone]

Originally posted by: Twitch
I would put each optical drive on their own cable so they don't share the bandwidth of one cable.

(You probably won't be doing direct copies from one disc to another, but if you wanted to burn 2 discs at once or just use both at the same time... I would think it is just personal preference to which drive goes on the primary/secondary connector (But for kicks I'd use the Burner on the primary connector)

Actually I didn't think about putting this in here but I will be burning DVD backups. We have a collection of about 100 DVDs (and growing). I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to make backups and store the originals in a fireproof safe.

 

[SeTeS]

If you were doing live (directly from source to target) copying of discs, then you're better off having the drives on separate ide channels.

BUT, in your case (DVD backups), it's likely that your duplication software is ripping the source to the hard drive, possibly compressing it, then burning to the DVDr. Having them on the same channel in this case won't make much of a difference, so save yourself some trouble and an extra cable cluttering your case and put them on the same cable.

 

[MrControversial]

I have SATA HDDs so I put my optical drives as Master/Master in IDE0 and IDE1 respectively.

 

[airfoil]

Each on its own IDE cable.

 

[Mudbone]

Originally posted by: SeTeS
If you were doing live (directly from source to target) copying of discs, then you're better off having the drives on separate ide channels.

BUT, in your case (DVD backups), it's likely that your duplication software is ripping the source to the hard drive, possibly compressing it, then burning to the DVDr. Having them on the same channel in this case won't make much of a difference, so save yourself some trouble and an extra cable cluttering your case and put them on the same cable.

That does bring up a question, what software will do a direct copy without going to the HD and is doing it this way preferable?

 

[Zepper]

One drive per channel allows for the best performance.
.bh.

 

[SeTeS]

Mudbone - I'm not sure if there are any dvd backup programs that do direct dvd to dvd duplicating. It's pretty common w/ cdr's, tho.

I have a dvdrom and a dvd burner on the same ide channel and I have no problems. I use dvdshrink for all my backups. Sure, if you're going to hd first, you can get by with just the dvd burner, but it's so much nicer to just pop the source dvd in the dvdrom and a blank in the burner, click a few buttons and walk away.