What's the best IDE setup for two DVD burners burning at the same time?

[iamtrout]

Currently I have:

DVD Burner (NEC 8X)
DVD Burner (NEC 16X)
CD Burner (LiteOn 48X)

ALL PATA:
120GB
80GB
160GB x 4

4 Drives can be attached on an IDE controller card, so one drive must be on external USB.

The 80GB is the primary with my OS.

How would you arrange these drives to get maximum performance? I want to be able to burn a DVD on both drives at the same time.

Source file on Secondary Master, DVD burner on Primary Slave, the second on primary IDE controller card?

Ideas?

 

[Zucarita9000]

IDE0 (primary):

Master: Boot HDD
Slave: 1st DVD burner

IDE1 (secondary):

Master: 2nd HDD
Slave: 2nd DVD Burner

Having two HDD or two burners on the same channel is not a good idea. You can't send data to both units at the same time. However, using a separate IDE channel for each burner will alow this, IIRC.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: Zucarita9000
IDE0 (primary):

Master: Boot HDD
Slave: 1st DVD burner

IDE1 (secondary):

Master: 2nd HDD
Slave: 2nd DVD Burner

Having two HDD or two burners on the same channel is not a good idea. You can't send data to both units at the same time. However, using a separate IDE channel for each burner will alow this, IIRC.

:thumbsup: I would have recommended the same thing.

 

[bowserjs]

Originally posted by: Zucarita9000
IDE0 (primary):

Master: Boot HDD
Slave: 1st DVD burner

IDE1 (secondary):

Master: 2nd HDD
Slave: 2nd DVD Burner

Having two HDD or two burners on the same channel is not a good idea. You can't send data to both units at the same time. However, using a separate IDE channel for each burner will alow this, IIRC.

I agree

 

[fell8]

Ideally, any drive you write to or read from should have it's own channel. Optical IDE drives require a compatible port, which may rule out the card. You might be able to boot from the card leaving both mobo IDE channels' primaries free for the optical drives. I don't recommend using the secondaries for source drives as only one drive per channel can be used at a time. Using the secondaries on the card for source drives shouldn't matter (giving you four drives) so long as you don't use both drives on a given channel channel at once. If you're lucky and the card does support optical drives, swap the mobo's and card's drives and apply the other suggestions accordingly.

If you really need to use all six drives, a USB destination drive is an acceptable option. Put both source drives on the same channel and the destination drive on it's own.

 

[iamtrout]

Cool! Thanks for the replies guys. Definitely did not know that only one drive per channel can be used at once.

 

[Kremerica]

That's why my dvd burning is sooo slow

i have just 1 hdd and 1 dvdr drive and they are both on the same ide channel.

so it tries to burn the source from the hdd on the same channel as the dvd burner.

 

[Steven the Leech]

Get a controller card [unless your mb has onboard raid/ide] put the 3 hd on the controller card, DVDR on master/onboard IDE, and cdrw on slave to a dvd drive/onboard IDE. This is how i have mine set up and have actually burned on all 3 at the same time with no problems. Usually only use 1 but frequently burn 2 dvd/isos at the same time, I should point out that I only burn at 6-8x on dvd due to my players not playing good unless I burn at 6-8x. Have burned 2 dvd at the same time at higher speeds but the buffer gets used up, and it will burn at slower speeds.

DVD 8x-master
CDRW-Slave
DVD 16x-master

 

[rizzaz]

am i wrong in thinking that if you put an optiical drive on the same ide channel as a hard drive the entire channel defaults to the speed of the optical (ATA33) hence slowing the hard drive down ?

 

[ribbon13]

Neither

 

[Zepper]

For best performance you should have each PATA drive on its own channel (one drive per channel). PCI PATA controllers are cheap and the SiliconImage based ones are the most flexible.

.bh.