CD-RW and DVD-RW

[Dave]

I have a system that currently has the hard drive as the Primary master and
the primary slave is empty. I then have a DVD-ROM drive as the secondary
master and a CD/RW and the secondary slave.

I am going to get a DVD/RW (+/-R and +/-RW) drive and I am trying to decide
how to go about adding it best. Can I leave it and make it the primary
slave? What configuration would allow ALL to stay?

Also if I decided to remove the DVD-ROM and add the DVD/RW, what would be
the configuration?

 

[Alvin A Brown]

Hello

Just slave it off your CD/RW and that's it

Alvin

 

[mcheu]

I have a system that currently has the hard drive as the Primary master and
the primary slave is empty. I then have a DVD-ROM drive as the secondary
master and a CD/RW and the secondary slave.

I am going to get a DVD/RW (+/-R and +/-RW) drive and I am trying to decide
how to go about adding it best. Can I leave it and make it the primary
slave? What configuration would allow ALL to stay?

Also if I decided to remove the DVD-ROM and add the DVD/RW, what would be
the configuration?

Any way you want it. As you mentioned, if you do not want to change
anything, put the DVD burner on as Primary slave. Done.

The performance and corruption issue with mixing opticals and hard
drives doesn't apply to modern drives and controllers.

If you decide to do some shuffling, keep in mind that for whatever
reason, some manufacturers insist that their drives have to be on a
specific position for a firmware update. The firmware updater for my
LG 4040B, for example, says that I have to have it sitting on
secondary master for the firmware flash to work right. First time
I've ever seen this, as all my past optical drives never had any
mention of this requirement in the firmware updates (and the drive the
drive it replaced was also a LG drive).

If you can find out such requirements in advance, it might save you
some drive shuffling later.

 

[ChrisJ9876]

From: Alvin A Brown (e-mail address removed)

Date: 11/13/2003 4:10 PM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id: <[email protected]>

Hello

Just slave it off your CD/RW and that's it

Alvin

Alvin, I hope you meant slave it behind the hard drive, since the CDRW is
already slaved behind the DVD-ROM.

 

[Dave]

That was the plan, until I seemed to remember reading somewhere about drive
conflicts when in certain positions.

 

[Alceryes]

It really shouldn't matter in the long run. There used to be certain
incompatibility issues when chaining some devices but that was years ago.

A few observations though -

If it were me, I'd dump the DVD-Rom and chain the DVD-RW and the CD-RW
together (any order) and keep the hard drive alone.
The only time when you may have a slow down is if you are transferring
massive amounts of data (an install for instance) to and from a drive that
is on the same chain. In other words if you had a hard drive and a cd-rom as
master and slave on the primary IDE channel and you were doing an install,
it would go slower then if you were doing the install from a cd-rom on the
secondary IDE channel.

 

[David B.]

You won't know you have a conflict until you try it.