Constantly misunderstood relationships of IDE controllers and
incorrect but normal build configurations by PC builders have caused
this situation.
When OEM builders or even Commercial PC builders put PCs together 99%
of the time they stick the CD/CDR/DVD drives on the same IDE
port/cable merely for convenience of build.
This is,"NOT" the optimal configuration for most people especially
these days.
If you are doing a lot of,"On-The-Fly" recordings,copying then you
want the CD/DVD drives on separate IDE ports.
My setup.
IDE zero Hard drive Master Standard CD slave.
IDE one Hard drive Master CDR/W drive slave.
On-the Fly recordings are at full speed because both devices
are,"Parents" when burning.
Image files are kept on my Main C drive which is my fastest and burnt
to my CDR/W drive on my 2nd IDE port.Again at the time of burning both
devices are,"Parent" devices.
To understand this this is how IDE chains work.
Single device on an IDE port is a,"Parent" e.g can read and write at
the same time across the data busses.Therefore it has
no,"Wait-States".
As soon as there are two devices on an IDE port they both
become,"Child" devices however they are only,"Child" devices if,"Both"
are being accessed at the same time.
A child device cannot read and write at the same time and
therefore,"Wait-States" occur.This is where the time goes when burning
large files.
One device will read a lump of data and then the other device
will write it but it has to wait until the 1st device has read it
before it can write it.
Now here's the thang(and the common misconception).
Just having two devices on the same IDE port/chain of differing speed
will not slow down the faster device(usually the hard drive) if the
slower device is not being accessed.To all intents and purposes the
device,"Not" being used at that moment is invisible.
All possible hardware configurations have been tried and tested to
support this.
Quick example.
650 meg data CD on-the-fly burn with CD and CDR on same IDE port/chain
24X around 10+ mins
Same file CD on IDE zero and CDR/W on IDE one 4 mins.
The reason it's less than half the time is because of other
factors,not just the wait-states but also the separate IDE chains will
also use RAM more efficiently because of (U)DMA)
Note:all drives regularly defragged and all redundant large files
removed from drives to make sure swapfile/pagefiles can do their job.
For win95/98/ME users also click here,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/easy.html
Also of the above assumes that all devices are running in their
correct(U)DMA modes.
To check that your drives are download the small:free
,"Nero-Info-Tool",
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/diag.html
The program does not need to be installed and can even be run from
within the .zip file.Under it's,"Configuration"tab it will give the
correct information about your system's drive modes.
HTH
--
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http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
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