I have the following four drives in a machine I've just put together: hard drive DVD/CD reader CD writer ZIP drive The question is: what's the best way to distribute them among primary/secondary and master/slave positions on the two available IDE cables? Obviously the hard drive goes primary/master, but how about the others? Wise heads here will surely know. Paul
How about: IDE0: hard drive DVD/CD reader IDE1: CD writer ZIP drive You may want to duplicate a CD, so keeping them in separate channels may allow faster transfers. -- Rafael
Rafael Herrera wrote:
How about:
IDE0: hard drive DVD/CD reader
IDE1: CD writer ZIP drive
You may want to duplicate a CD, so keeping them in separate channels may allow faster transfers.
That's actually how I have them at the moment for just the reason you suggest, but I wasn't at all sure that was the best arrangement. It also stresses the cables a bit since they have to span from the 3 1/2" bays to the 5 1/4" bays. The motherboard manual claims that it might slow down the hard drive to have a CD drive on the same channel, but I don't entirely believe them, especially since the manual was written in Chinglish. Paul
From Paul Abrahams to SuSE listserve about Re: [SLE] [OT]: Distributing...:
Rafael Herrera wrote:
How about:
IDE0: hard drive DVD/CD reader
IDE1: CD writer ZIP drive
You may want to duplicate a CD, so keeping them in separate channels may allow faster transfers.
That's actually how I have them at the moment for just the reason you suggest, but I wasn't at all sure that was the best arrangement. It also stresses the cables a bit since they have to span from the 3 1/2" bays to the 5 1/4" bays.
The motherboard manual claims that it might slow down the hard drive to have a CD drive on the same channel, but I don't entirely believe them, especially since the manual was written in Chinglish.
The fastest combination is indeed disks together and cdroms together, but with a zipdrive ... ? Maybe it's the best to connect the device you use most secondary master and if that's one of the cdroms the other cdrom secondary slave. You can try all possibilities and test for a difference in performance ;)
Paul
-- dieter
On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, dieter wrote:
The motherboard manual claims that it might slow down the hard drive to have a CD drive on the same channel, but I don't entirely believe them, especially since the manual was written in Chinglish.
The fastest combination is indeed disks together and cdroms together, but with a zipdrive ... ?
Maybe it's the best to connect the device you use most secondary master and if that's one of the cdroms the other cdrom secondary slave. You can try all possibilities and test for a difference in performance ;)
What I have been doing with my system is to have an ATA66 PCI card for the hard drives, and use the motherboard controller for the cdrom drives, with each device being the master on each channel. Or, on another system that I have, I use the motherboard controller for the hard drives and a SCSI controller for a SCSI cdrom drive. It's a little bit more involve than working with what you already got, but it's a nice performance increase. Christopher Reimer
Paul Abrahams wrote:
I have the following four drives in a machine I've just put together:
hard drive DVD/CD reader CD writer ZIP drive
The question is: what's the best way to distribute them among primary/secondary and master/slave positions on the two available IDE cables? Obviously the hard drive goes primary/master, but how about the others?
Wise heads here will surely know.
Paul
The problem with EIDE bus is that both master and slave can only be reading or writing. Master cant write while slave is reading and vice versa. I do not think there is an universal way to put EIDE stuff together, just try it. My experience is that a CDROM connected at the same controller as the HD slows down a lot the installation of any OS, and there should be no problem with CDROM and CDRW on the same cable if you have enough ram to make a buffer. I have tried it up to 8X. Ciao, Tazio
Tazio Ceri wrote:
My experience is that a CDROM connected at the same controller as the HD slows down a lot the installation of any OS, and there should be no problem with CDROM and CDRW on the same cable if you have enough ram to make a buffer. I have tried it up to 8X.
I wonder - when the CDROM isn't actually in use, does its presence on the controller slow down the HD at all? I wouldn't expect so, but one never knows. Paul
Paul Abrahams wrote:
Tazio Ceri wrote:
My experience is that a CDROM connected at the same controller as the HD slows down a lot the installation of any OS, and there should be no problem with CDROM and CDRW on the same cable if you have enough ram to make a buffer. I have tried it up to 8X.
I wonder - when the CDROM isn't actually in use, does its presence on the controller slow down the HD at all? I wouldn't expect so, but one never knows.
Paul
Of course it does not. Tazio
Tazio Ceri wrote:
I have the following four drives in a machine I've just put together:
hard drive DVD/CD reader CD writer ZIP drive
The problem with EIDE bus is that both master and slave can only be reading or writing. Master cant write while slave is reading and vice versa. I do not think there is an universal way to put EIDE stuff together, just try it. My experience is that a CDROM connected at the same controller as the HD slows down a lot the installation of any OS, and there should be no problem with CDROM and CDRW on the same cable if you have enough ram to make a buffer. I have tried it up to 8X.
Tazio's suggestion may be better. Put the devices you will be using most frequently on separate buses. You may have to experiment to see if the hd and the writer can live in the same bus by creating a CD with both iso to CD-R and mkisofs to CD-R.Tazio Ceri wrote: -- Rafael
participants (5)
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Christopher D. Reimer -
dieter -
Paul Abrahams -
Rafael Herrera -
Tazio Ceri