Help with order of devices on IDE channels

[samphire]

Hi,

Can you tell me the best order for the following devices on my KT7A-Raid board? (I have 4 IDE channels and 6 devices).

I have 3 HDDs - one with the OS (WinXP), and two for storage.
I have a CD-Rom, a CD-RW and a DVD-Rom.


Thank you.

Chris

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Put the OS on the primary IDE channel as master.
It should be alone for maximum performance...

I'd put the DVD-Rom and one of the storage drives on the secondary IDE channel (harddrive as master)...
To get maximum efficiency, I'd put the storage drive your most likely not to use whilst you are using the DVD.

Then put the CD-Rom on one RAID channel with the last storage drive, and the CD-RW on the other RAID channel...

That should give you quite good performance when you are burning, using your OS, etc...

But you won't achieve optimal performance if you are accessing more than one device per channel at the same time...

Hope this helps

 

[Phantasm66]

Does your RAID controller allow devices other than HDDs to be attached? If not, then your choices are pretty much made for you.

 

[samphire]

Thank you both.

My manual says to *not* put CD-Drives etc on the Raid card, so I guess I ought to stick to that. Thanks again.

 

[MrGaribaldi]

The RAID controller can handle CD drives without a hitch on the KT7A-RAID... (At least the ones I've had does...)

I guess the reason the manual says not to put them there is because it'll decrease the speed of the RAID array/ stop the controller from creating an array...

But since you're not going to use an array....


.02$

 

[samphire]

Thanks for that. I am tempted to put the DVD on a RAID channel, because at the moment, I have a master free there.

I'm concerned if I move everything, I may get into a mess. Will my drives change names if I move them? (ie C might change to D etc)

 

[Phantasm66]

Originally posted by samphire

I have 3 HHDs - one with the OS (WinXP), and two for storage.
I have a CD-Rom, a CD-RW and a DVD-Rom.

I would be tempted to do it this way.....

PRIMARY MASTER - HDD for operating systems.

PRIMARY SLAVE - CD-ROM DRIVE

SECONDARY MASTER - CD-RW DRIVE

SECONDARY SLAVE - DVD-ROM

on RAID controller place 2 HDDs, of similar size, combine to make RAID 0 stripe set. If you want all of the array as one partition, then format it with NTFS.

I am assuming here that the 2 HDDs will be the same size on the raid controller. Remember that you can only have 2 x the smallest disk times number of disks as the array size, so if you combine 1 x 40 GB and 1 x 60 GB, you are getting 2 x 40 GB and wasting 20 GB.

 

[StormBringer]

Thats pretty much same as what I would do Phant.

Though, I have to ask, why does he need a CDROM drive, when he already has a CDRW and a DVDROM, I can't think of any reason to need three devices that will all play CDROMs.

 

[samphire]

Thanks for all your help.

I'm slighlty concerned that the DVD drive might be a little noisy when playing CDs (the CD-RW is). If it's not, perhaps I will just ditch the CD Rom.

 

[Phantasm66]

I think that the DVD-ROM, CD-RW and CD-ROM all in the machine at once ISN'T TOO MUCH, if the box is a multimedia machine. Both of my home machines have this, and its a good setup for playing games, movies, etc.