Hi; I've been having fun all day.:-) After opening up my PC and seeing the amount of dust thats built up over the year, I gave every thing a complete clean out (even removing the motherboard). I even used the Vaccum cleaner to clean the case out. Once I came to put back the ide cables I realised that I could have both of my hard drives using the ATA100 connectors on my Asus A7V motherboard. The final drive arrangements are as follows. 40Gig hd on primary ATA100 (master) 15Gig hd on Secondary ATA100 (master) DvD rom on primary ATA66 (master) cd -rw on secondary ATA66 (master) This solves my origional question below. Also I removed my Windows partition and am now running my system Windows free. It's only taken a year (I've got a lot of games, but now I have a Playstation 2:-)

I have a choice of hard disk setup options. Which one is faster for linux?

1. Use Two hard drives at ATA66, in which I place the swap partition and VAR partition on the other disk, so linux will access both disks at the same time. (ie. opening a program and writing a log).

2. Use one disk at ATA100. (only one disk due to the IDE cable not being long enough - I have a full tower and some of the drive bays are quite away from the motherboard)

If 2. then will SuSE 7.2 support the Promise Ultra ATA100 controller on the Asus A7V motherboard?

Thanks for your help.

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I've explained in more detail my system situation below.

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I have a choice of hard disk setup options. Which one is faster for linux?

1. Use Two hard drives at ATA66, in which I place the swap partition and VAR partition on the other disk, so linux will access both disks at the same time. (ie. opening a program and writing a log).

2. Use one disk at ATA100. (only one disk due to the IDE cable not being long enough - I have a full tower and some of the drive bays are quite away from the motherboard)

If 2. then will SuSE 7.2 support the Promise Ultra ATA100 controller on the Asus A7V motherboard?

Thanks for your help.

Here's more details of the system.

The above hard drive setup will use exactly the same components as I'm using now, so they are all compatable with SuSE. Both hard drives (EIDE) are of an identacle model (maxtor diamond max +) but one is 40Gb and one is 15Gb. I'm the only user on the system (my personal home desktop PC), with default desktop setup of SuSE 7.2 (updated to latest kernel, Xfree, etc).

Here is a quick hardware list. 1Ghz athlon 512Mb of 133MHz RAM ASUS A7V motherboard

On Wednesday 27 March 2002 12:57 am, scsijon wrote:

If you can afford it add the 40g drive, put it on the second ide cable / bus (put your cdrom on the ata66's cable). Your motherboard is suppose to be able to handle different speed bus on DIFFERENT cables without adding wait's on the faster drive's cache (which is what you usually get if you mix ata66 and ata100 on the same ide bus). Put your caches (yes you can have more than one if you wish -up to 16 actually without patching) on the start of the 40g as that means less head movement to use however unless your using big databases or heavy memory using programs I would suspect you would be doing little caching.

and have fun

scsijon

-- --------- Darren Harmon http://users.breathemail.net/darren.harmon1/