Hard-drive cable question

[paul814]

Should the master be on the connector closeest to the motherboard or at
the end of the cable?

 

[Mike Walsh]

It does not matter unless you use cable select.

Should the master be on the connector closeest to the motherboard or at
the end of the cable?

 

[paul814]

OK thanks!
Anyone care to help with my continuing problem? the topic is under 2
HHD ... just to add to that also, I have now tried at boot to select
the drive to boot from, no matter what drive I select of the two
listed, win xp loads and no mention of asking for my option of what OS
to boot.

 

[Ralph Mowery]

Should the master be on the connector closeest to the motherboard or at
the end of the cable?

Usually the master should be on the end and the slave in the middle. YOu
may run into some unusual problems in the drive being reconised if not done
that way. At one time it did not mater but with todays drives it can even
if not using cable select.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Usually the master should be on the end and the slave in the middle.
YOu may run into some unusual problems in the drive being reconised
if not done that way. At one time it did not mater but with todays
drives it can even if not using cable select.

The roles of Master and Slave on a single cable are only to
1) differentiate the 2 drives to the channel controller, and
2) to determine the default boot order in the BIOS. But the
boot order can be changed via keyboard input to the BIOS,
so Master/Slave relationships have no permanent importance.

Specifically, if you jumper two HDs Master and Slave and put
the Slave at the end of the cable and the Master in the middle,
the Master HD will still default to the head of the boot order
unless manually changed. Once the head HD is selected as
the boot HD, Master/Slave becomes totally irrelevant as far
as the operating system is concerned. Indeed, with SATA
HDs, where there is no Master/Slave parameter, the OS is
totally oblivious to its absence.

*~TimDaniels~*