Both hard drives on same IDE cable? or No?

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krismeister

Posts: 8   +6
IDE cable 1
master-hardrive 1
slave - hardrive 2
IDE cable 2
master-dvd 1

or

IDE cable 1
master-hardrive 1
IDE cable 2
master - hardrive 2
slave - dvd 1

do the above configurations make any difference?
thanks
 
IDE cable 1
master-hardrive 1
slave - hardrive 2
IDE cable 2
master-dvd 1

That is absolutely fine and the best way to go about it.

Regards Howard :)
 
I'm familiar with building machines, but was wondering if there was a performance benefit.

Something like being able to access one primary IDE and one secondary IDE at the same time, but not the Master Primary and Slave primary at the same time.
 
I`m sure someone will correct me if I`m wrong, but I was always led to believe, that putting a hard drive on the same channel as an optical drive could in theory slow the hard drive down.

That`s why I recommend keeping the hard drives on the same channel.

Regards Howard :)
 
if the cable was 80 wire and ide is ATA/133
I would use the 2nd channel set it to slave
a standard system you will not notice speed maybe a litle faster access
 
one is UDMA mode 5 100MB/sec
the other is one is UDMA mode 6 133MB/sec

currently both drives are on the same IDE cable and it appears in my device manager that they both are operating at those speeds.

and as for noticing the speed, do half the stuff we tweak really make a noticable difference. But there has to be a better way to do it, or not.
 
my $0.02

There are reasons to only put like devices on the same IDE channel. There are even reasons to have 1 device per channel.
1) ATA vs ATAPI - if you put them on the same channel, you force windows to use "compatibility mode" - a generic, sloooowww, built-in driver - very much like the video driver loaded in safe mode.
2) your IDE controller may not even initialize in some configurations (1 channel with only a slave connected is an example).
3) if you are intending to use one of the fault tolerant RAID levels (1, 5, 10 or 0+1), you should have 1 device per channel - otherwise you will likely not be able to recover from a drive failure. For RAID 0 it doesn't matter, since if a drive fails the data is lost anyway. I've never heard of anyone actually using any of the other RAID levels :rolleyes:
4) depending on the IDE controller & OS, mixing speeds could force the higher speed drive to use the lower speed.
5) if you typically access all drives simultaneously, you may benefit from having 1 device per channel. IMHO you would only need this on a server.

Some optical drives use the ATA standard, others use ATAPI, hence the general precaution of putting optical drives on a separate channel from HDDs. So, bottom line is, yes, it can make a difference, but depending on the capabilities of your controller/chipset, and the specs of all drives involved YMMV.
 
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