Saw this mentioned on another forum and not really thought about it before...

I have the typical mobo with 2x IDE connectors on it, allowing me 4x IDE devices (I have a master HDD (C:\) and a slave HDD (F:\) on IDE1, and a DVD-RW (D:\) and DVD-ROM (E:\) on IDE2)

Anyway, I read that the above set up is very efficient. I know I can only get PIO ONLY mode between the two HDD's rather than DMA or ULTRA DMA....

It was written that the best way to do it is like so;



Apparently that way, when "talking" between the two HDD's, the speed will be quicker, specially when copying data between HDD's, as they aren't using a common cable/IDE channel, and having the DVD-RW drive on the same channel as the master C:\ HDD means that burning data from the slave HDD will be quicker, and copying from disc to disc between the two DVD drives will also be quicker....

Is this right?

Next question - if I power off my PC, swap the connectors to the above config, and boot up, will it all work fine, as in the pooter recognise which drive is which and where it is and all work as per normal, or will it have a fit as drive letters are already assigned?

 

There is no such thing as a IDE device, its a misused term.. the Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface is a standard way for a storage device to connect to a computer... the devices which use this interface are PATA, or Parallel ATA.

Yes the picture you display does display the fastest way to run PATA devices with the hard disks being on seperate channels. Both hard disks would be masters on the different channels, with the optical drives each being the slaves on each respective channel

pretty good chance of it freaking out considering windows can do this just by being switched on

 

It should load into XP and keep your drive letter's the same, however, this is windows we are talking about

 

So should I do it or not? And I know about master and slave etc - tho I just keep everything as Cable Select for ease of swapping about on IDE connectors.....

 

Q: Should you do it...
A: if it all goes pear shaped are you prepared to reinstall ?

if you are not prepared to reinstall then you should not do this to a stable system as it may go wrong given than Windows takes most chances handed to it to screw you over

Should be allright, but who really knows with Windows

 

I only reinstalled a few months ago and no, I am not prepared to do it all over again just yet

 

The performance issue arises because of where IDE came from. IDE was designed as a cheap alternative to SCSI, and to replace the old 8-bit MFM and RLL interfaces. MFM and RLL could only address one hard disk at a time, even though two could be attached to the same controller. IDE simply moved most of the controller card onto the disk, reducing cost greatly, but kept some of the inherent MFM limitations - including the 8 bit data path.

IDE (or Parallel ATA as it's recently become known) is unable to talk to more than one device at a time on one cable. For example, if you were copying from the slave on channel 0 to the master on channel 0, it would take longer than if you were copying from a device on channel 1 to a device on channel 0 because only one device per cable can be addressed at once, whereas SCSI can talk to every device on the channel (up to 15 devices opposed to IDE's 2) if necessary.

You'll also find that with IDE, the maximum speed of the channel will be dictated by the slowest drive on that channel, as IDE cannot run different 'mode' devices concurrently. For example, your UDMA100 disk will be crippled if you run a PIO mode 3 CD drive on the same cable.

I've always run IDE CD drives on the secondary channel, and why I've always tried to run full SCSI systems that avoid this caveat anyway. At the moment, the only IDE devices I have are my DVD and CD writers - my hard disks are U160 SCSI

Cable Select works only if you have suitable cables which are wired for use in Cable Select Mode. It was rediscovered by some 'genius' in the last few years. You're as well leaving your devices set at Cable Select just for ease of use. However, in the diagram above, your drives will not be physically laid out that way (I'm guessing your optical drives are in the 5.25" bays at the top of the machine, and the hard disks in the 3.5" bays at the bottom, so you may find that you need to set at least one drive on each bus to cable select and force the other.

As long as your boot drive remains where it is, Windows will sort itself out, and you can reassign the drive letters if necessary in Computer Management.

 

Well I thought that (windows would sort it out and I know I can reassign drive letters as I had to do it before) but to be honest, I don't want to run the risk of Windows having a heart attack and needing reinstallation, so I will leave it till next time I am ready to format/reinstall, just in case......

 

Thrush, if windows doesn't, you can go into Control Panel, then Administritive Tools, The Computer Management, The Disk Management and change the drive letters accordingly.

I personally wouldn't bother, I have 2 x hard drives on IDE 0 as master and slave, and pioneer dvd rom and pioneer dvd-rw on ide 1 as master and slave and have no issues whatsoever

 

Dan, I know how to change and reassign drive letters

And I dodn't have any issues as such, but it tould be nice if when I was copying files from C drive to the slave, or playing media files from the slave through a media player on the C, that the computer wouldn't go silly slow and juddery.....

 

That's probably more of a general performance issue rather then IDE transfer rates, what CPU do you have ?

 

2.8ghz Pentium 4, 1.5gb RAM

Been told the reason it slows down is when transferring large-ish files from one HDD to the other, as IDE cables can only access one drive at a time, so it sends the info down the cable from the primary drive, reads the info, then sends it back up the cable to the slave drive, then repeats the steps - but it's READ > WRITE > READ > WRITE > READ > WRITE etc, never reading and writing at the same time..... Due to the layout of the devices on the cable arrangement.....

 

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