What's an ata/66 harddrive's speed if it's connected to an ata/66 cable with a cdrom?

[rubbub]

Will the harddrive work at the same speed as cdrom?

Thanks

 

[BlueScreenVW]

That's actually a very good question... All I can say is that a friend of mine gained about 30% in Sisoft Sandra HDD bench when he moved his CDROM to another cable (my suggestion). But this was whit an ATA33 controller on a BX board, which perhaps isn't perfectly relevant. One thing is sure, though: never have a DMA device on the same cable as a non-DMA device!

 

[paulip88]

For IDE, the speed of the cable is the speed of the slowest device. Generally, CDs do not use the faster interfaces like the hard drives. Only a few CDs and DVDs support ATA66.

 

[dt]

The proper procedure is to NEVER put a CD-Rom Drive on the same cable as your primary master HDD. It is a sloppy practice that a lot of techs take. You HDD performance will be degraded.

I would go further to say that if you also have a ata 33 drive as a "D" Drive, also put that on the secondary IDE channel to maintain the best performance.

 

[gmccall]

Hmmmm..... I have a Hard drive (ata-66) a cd-rom and a cd-rw. Right now I have the Hard drive and CD-rom on the same primary cable because I have heard having the 2 cd-rom devices on the same cable would cause problems when copying cd's. Any truth to this? Thanks.

 

[dennilfloss]

Well, I have only 4 spots for IDE devices and mine are as follow:

Primary Master: Quantum Fireball Plus LM
Primary Slave: Aopen 40x CD-ROM

Secondary Master: LS-120 2x
Secondary Slave: Ricoh MP 7040A CD-RW

AFAIK, the CD-ROM is faster than the LS-120 and probably faster than the burner. My P3B-F mobo is ATA33 only right now but I'm upgrading to a K7T Pro2A.

 

[PCAddict]

There have been a few other threads related to this question, and it was said that with newer motherboards/chipsets you can mix ATA-33 and ATA-66 devices on the same cable without having the faster device operate at the lower speed.

 

[JackMDS]

When you have two devices on the same cable, they can not work at same time.

Let say that we copy files from a CD to the hard drive. If the CD is on a same Channel (i.e. slave on the HD cable), the constant alternation between the two will slow the whole process. If the CD is on another channel the CD and the HD can work in tandem, and the process will be faster. In other word the way you connect them depends on they you work.

The best is to use a Mobo that have four IDE channels (like the Abit BE6), or to add a pci ATA66 (100) card, and to use the ATA66 (100) channels for the HD, and the regular IDE channels for the variety of CD, and other ATAPI devices.

 

[Pariah]

Newer boards will run each device at its highest rated interface. Only one device can access each channel regardless of what interface speed they are running, which may or may not have a noticable impact on speed.

 

[CAMS]

All new IDE chipset should support (independent device timing) so yes they both should run at there maximum speed.

Forgot the link.

PC Guide

 

[ArkAoss]

yeah, if you have enough channels its good to try to have each device have its own channel with ide, i have a board with 2 66 and 2 33 channels. have a single hard drive as master on each of the 66 channels. and have a burner alone on a 33 and a dvd and 40x share the last 33. if only 2 channels put burner on a channel alone if possible. . that way you can have fastest possible speeds from either cd rom or hd to burner. and if you have a good burner you'll still be able to get fast speeds installing from it, though alot of people say you shouldn't use a burner as the primary cd to run from. it all breaks down to what you have for equipment, of course from what i here from scsi people you can have a scsi burner copying from one hard drive on a channel while watching a dvd on that channel, while playing a game from a cdrom and other HD on that channel, because scsi is all power full. right scsi people?

 

[Dulanic]

I couldnt tell you personally I find a setup with stuff on its own controller works best.... Mine is like this

Primary
Master:Kenwood 72X
Slave:Creative 5X DVD
Secondary
Iomega 12x4x32 CDRW (Alone)


Primary Promise ATA100
Master:Maxtor 30GB ATA100
Secondary:Maxtor 45GB ATA100
Secondary Promise ATA100
Alone:WD 13GB ATA66

I have a A7V so I have the built in Promise Controller