Disk No query (Vista 32 Home Premium)

[ColMac]

I've got a silly question here. Its not really a problem, but I like my PC's
to be set up the way I like it, and anything that changes it annoys me.

I have 3 physical IDE disks on my PC.

I've just formatted the C drive on of the IDE drives, on one of my PC's and
re-installed everything, as it was time for a clean-up. To do this I
disconnected two IDE drives leaving me with an IDE HDD & a CD drive as the
slave. The Bios found them as Primary Master and Primary slave as expected.
Windows Disk Management COnsole showed my C Drive as Disk 0 again as expected.

When all was working fine, I added the other HDD's as Secondary Master &
slave. Again the Bios showed them correctly.
..However Windows Disk Management had changed my original Disk 0 to Disk 2

Any ideas why this happens or what I can do to prevent it. As I said its no
big deal and it doesn't cause real issues but for eg when testing disks I
like my C drive to be disk 0 to reduce the chance of an error in formatting
the wrong disk.

Ta

 

[Mick Murphy]

One thing; you are slowing down your computer by having your main HD and CD
drive on the same IDE cable

 

[ColMac]

Don't have a lot of choice with 4 ide drives tho

One thing; you are slowing down your computer by having your main HD and CD
drive on the same IDE cable

 

[Curious]

Have you tried switching the two IDE cable connections on the MOBO since is
for IDE channel and the other for IDE channel 2?

 

[ColMac]

Yes I did try that as well. Made no difference. So it cannot be a random
allocation of disk nos. It must be pre-ordained as my C drives ends up as
drive 2 whatever way it is connected. As I said initially, I even started
with only 1 HDD, and then added the other ones. my C drive went from being
disk 0 to disk 2


Colin

 

[Mick Murphy]

I assume you are using the other 2 IDE HD as storage.

Why don't you have a Master(operating system) and Slave(Storage) HD on main
IDE channel, and the CD/DVD + the other HD(storage) on the other IDE channel?

Or scrap the second HD on CD IDE channel, and go USB External HD

Just a thought to speed things up a bit!

 

[John Barnes]

Check the settings for your drives and priorities in the BIOS and make sure
that the drives jumpers match the position they are on on the IDE cable
(master/slave/cs)

 

[ColMac]

I'll check that when I get home. I'm fairly sure they are set correctly tho

 

[ColMac]

Is there really that much of a pereformance hit?

Is there any way I can measure it. I'm interested in finding out more tho.

And surely the delay caused by a Slave CD/DVD will be replaced by the delay
caused by haveing a slave HDD. Also the CD/DVD drive is accessed maybe once a
week. Each of the HDD droives are accessed every hour of every day. So surely
I'm replacing a delay which has no practical impact, with a delay which would
have a constant impact?


Colin

 

[Curious]

AFAIK there is no performance hit unless you are using both at the same time
since an IDE bus can only send or receive from one device at a time.

 

[ColMac]

I must admit that was my suspicion, but I'm certainly not an expert.


Colin

 

[John Barnes]

Even if you are using both at the same time, there is plenty of bandwidth to
handle the task. The controller switches back and forth as packets of data
and requests are made.