The Seabat said:
This has probably been debated forever, but maybe some one can give me
a difinitive answer. Ha!
I have two 40GB hard drives, one DVD burner and one CD/RW burner. What
is the best way to arrainge these puppies on the two IDE channels for
optimum performance? I don't plan on ever doing any disc-to-disc
copying, so that is not a concern. Right now I have the boot drive and
the DVD burner on the Primary channel and the other hard drive and the
CD/RW burner on the Secondary channel. Both the CD and DVD drives are
set as slaves and the hard drives set as masters.
Someone said that it is better to have both hard drives on the Primary
and the two burners on the Secondary. Is this better than the way I
have it?
Running Windows 98, Athlon XP 1800+, 256MB RAM
Thank you.
Seabat:
As you have or will have discovered, you're going to get a number of
responses
recommending this or that configuration of your IDE-connected devices. Based
upon my own experience and tests the computer facility I was associated with
conducted a few years ago on this very issue -- in virtually every case,
aside from
connecting one's working HD as Primary Master, it really didn't matter
performance-wise how the remaining drives (hard drives & optical drives)
were connected on the two IDE channels. I should add that (as I recall) all
of our tests in this area involved the XP OS, but I don't think there would
have been any significant differences using the Win9x/Me operating systems.
Nearly all of our tests were conducted with connecting two hard drives and
two optical drives - a CD-ROM & a CD-DVD burner.
Note I said "virtually every case". There were some rather rare situations
where it did matter with respect to HD connections/configurations. This
usually involved the encoding/decoding of extremely large video files
(gigabytes in size).
Also, again in some very rare instances, where the process involved copying
CDs (we didn't use DVDs) from one optical drive to another optical drive,
there were some instances (rare as they might be) where the configuration of
the optical drives *did* matter in terms of performance. Strangely enough,
in that situation we were unable to come up with a hard & fast rule as to
the best configuration of the optical drives. In some cases we found better,
i.e., faster, data transfer rates when both optical drives were connected on
the same channel. In other cases it was best to connect each on a separate
IDE channel. And we could find no correlation involving the make/model of
these optical drives. It was quite puzzling. But let me emphasize that these
were relatively rare exceptions. As I previously stated, we generally found
*no* significant performance differences regardless of how the optical
drives were connected/configured.
But do this. Experiment for yourself. In this instance don't rely on my
advice or anyone else's. Try different configurations of your devices and
run speed tests based on your normal day-to-day activities with the
computer, i.e., accessing programs, moving/copying files, burning CDs, etc.
See if there's any performance difference depending upon how this or that
device is connected and thus determine the best setup for your particular
needs.
Anna
