Does CD-R slow down hard drive on same cable?

[Larry]

Is the following really true of XP?


from: http://www.techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

"Make sure your hard drive is not connected to the same IDE port as
your CD/DVD-ROM. Each IDE port is programmed to operate at the slower
of the two devices on the port, so you could be slowing down access
to your primary hard drive by leaving a CD-ROM on the same channel.
Put your CD/DVD-ROM on the Secondary IDE port."

 

[Vagabond Software]

Is the following really true of XP?


from: http://www.techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

"Make sure your hard drive is not connected to the same IDE port as
your CD/DVD-ROM. Each IDE port is programmed to operate at the slower
of the two devices on the port, so you could be slowing down access
to your primary hard drive by leaving a CD-ROM on the same channel.
Put your CD/DVD-ROM on the Secondary IDE port."

The answer is... it depends. Do traffic lights slow down my drive to the
grocery store? Not if they're always green.

The same principle applies to IDE controller sharing. The controller can
only respond to one request at a time. So, having two devices sharing the
same controller could lead to a situation where one device is going to hit a
"red light" and end up waiting for the controller to service its request.

In terms of practical use, this never happens or happens so infrequently
that it is not a perceptible impact. However, if you are running a
file-streaming application that is more likely to cause many of these "red
lights", then you would definite want to re-configure your IDE devices or
use a different bus type, like SCSI.

Regards,

Carl

 

[Jerry]

Most motherborads come with two IDE connectors. Use one for the harddrives
and the other for CD/DVD drives.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

If your PC does not have a secondary IDE controller/channel on the
motherboard, you should look at adding a PCI IDE controller. This will
definitely help with most of your CD/DVD burns.

 

[Patti MacLeod]

Hi Larry,

Barring other elements that may affect the "speed" of the drives on a single
controller (eg., running a file-streaming application, as Vagabond Software
mentions), what they are referring to in the Hard Drive Port section was
true of Single FIFO IDE controllers. Since the introduction of Dual FIFO
(approximately 10 years ago), the transfer rate of each drive on a
particular controller is not governed by the slowest drive on that
controller.

If your OS is XP, chances are, your computer has a motherboard chipset that
supports Dual FIFO.

Regards,