Newbie question about drive positions

[Dave Smith]

Sorry, I know these are really basic questions, but...

I'm setting up two new CD drives on my Asus A7v333 board with two hard
drives. Am I correct that the drives should be set up with the boot
drive as Primary master, and the CD-ROM as Primary slave then the
second hard drive as Secondary master and the CD-RW as Secondary
slave?

As I understand it, data is transferred faster when the drives are on
separate cables. Is there really enough of a difference to matter?
Are there other reasons for the drives to be set up a certain way?

Thanks very much for any advice.

 

[MCheu]

Sorry, I know these are really basic questions, but...

I'm setting up two new CD drives on my Asus A7v333 board with two hard
drives. Am I correct that the drives should be set up with the boot
drive as Primary master, and the CD-ROM as Primary slave then the
second hard drive as Secondary master and the CD-RW as Secondary
slave?

As I understand it, data is transferred faster when the drives are on
separate cables. Is there really enough of a difference to matter?
Are there other reasons for the drives to be set up a certain way?

Thanks very much for any advice.

Really, the only requirement is that the boot drive be primary master.

Traditional configuration was

Primary Master: Boot hard drive
Primary Slave: Second hard drive

Secondary master: Optical disc reader (ie. CDROM or DVDROM)
Secondary Slave: Optical disc writer (ie. CDRW or DVD...)

The reasons for these drives to be set up this way have long since
been resolved. With a modern controller, with the exception of the
boot drive, you can put your other drives at any position you wish.
Assuming there isn't some other occupant already there, of course.

 

[~misfit~]

Nope, the IDE channel defaults to the speed of the slowest drive on that
channel.

Ummm, <cough>bullshit<cough>.

My ATA133 drive shares an 80 wire cable with a CD-ROM on an ATA100
controller and gets good speeds in HDD tests. A lot better than the ATA66
drive that is sharing a controller with my CD-RW. And it's nothing to do
with the buffer size either, (although they differ) I've used sustained
write/read tests.

Your statement may have been true once but it isn't any longer. It doesn't
really matter where you put drives anymore, as MCheu correctly pointed out.

 

[rcm]

Wrong. Wow, what misinformation you spew. Unless of course you are still on
a 486, Stacey. Time to upgrade to at least a Pent 1.

 

[philo]

Sorry, I know these are really basic questions, but...

I'm setting up two new CD drives on my Asus A7v333 board with two hard
drives. Am I correct that the drives should be set up with the boot
drive as Primary master, and the CD-ROM as Primary slave then the
second hard drive as Secondary master and the CD-RW as Secondary
slave?

As I understand it, data is transferred faster when the drives are on
separate cables. Is there really enough of a difference to matter?
Are there other reasons for the drives to be set up a certain way?

Thanks very much for any advice.

if you are going to copy a cd "on the fly"
Nero suggests having your two cd's on seperate channels

 

[Mike Walsh]

If DMA is working on both drives you will not have any problems with both drives on the same cable.

 

[AD C]

philo wrote:

if you are going to copy a cd "on the fly"
Nero suggests having your two cd's on seperate channels

That is true, but it is not so important with burn proof Drives.
I did build one computer, where the CD writer did not being on the same
cable as the DVD drive, but all it took was a change to the slave and
master jumpers, the CD writer did not work when it was master, but
worked fine as slave.

Very strange.

 

[AD C]

kony wrote:

Through misconfiguration it's possible, but the motherboard controller

I more or less know what I am doing, but, yes, I could have done
something wrong, not sure how?

and OS both support full speed operation by both devices, up to
whichever limiter applies, be it a 40-pin cable, the max ATA mode
supported, or the drive itself, as it's been since about 1995. Having

I see, I never realised they solved the problem that early.
I got my first P.C around 1996 and i was told then that you should not
put a lower speed CDrom drive on the same cable as a faster hard drive.

it (one slowing down the other) occur is the exception rather than the
rule.

I see.

 

[kony]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 22:29:07 +0000 (UTC), AD C

it's been since about 1995.

I see, I never realised they solved the problem that early.
I got my first P.C around 1996 and i was told then that you should not
put a lower speed CDrom drive on the same cable as a faster hard drive.

I did fail to mention one very important little detail...

They have to both be running in UATA mode. PIO can't be used on the
CDROM and UATA on the HDD, for example.


Dave

 

[Mike Walsh]

If you run both CD drives in PIO mode with burn proof on the same cable you will not make coasters, but burning will be very slow and a lot of space will be wasted because of the write operation constantly stopping and starting.]

 

[Stacey]

~misfit~ wrote:



I would not be so sure of that, I found a difference when i took my
CDwriter from the same ccable as my hard drive. That was on the Epox
board,

I found the same thing when I was testing my last system. But if people say
this isn't true, I guess I imagined this..

 

[Stacey]

Wrong. Wow, what misinformation you spew. Unless of course you are still
on
a 486, Stacey. Time to upgrade to at least a Pent 1.

My bad, I was thinking about the pre ata-33 CDroms.. That wasn't THAT long
ago was it?

 

[kony]

I found the same thing when I was testing my last system. But if people say
this isn't true, I guess I imagined this..

It's not impossible for the situation you described to occur, just
uncommon. Perhaps a specific motherboard or specific drive bug, but
it's not a problem you should expect to encounter very often unless
dealing with the same buggy components over and over again.

Dave

 

[AD C]

If you run both CD drives in PIO mode with burn proof on the same cable
you will not make coasters, but burning will be very slow and a lot of
space will be wasted because of the write operation constantly stopping
and starting.]

I see, I am still getting used to these ATAPI writers, I had a Scsi one
for years, No burn proof, but I had very few coasters from it, but then
it only wrote at 8 speed.