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  1. I have a PC that was custom built about 6 years ago. It still works great, it has a Tyan Tyger MPX motherboard, dual Athalon processors, and 1gb RAM. I currently have 2 DVD burners that are hooked together as a slave/master using a single 80 wire IDE straight to the motherboard in the ATA 100 suported secondary IDE port . I also have 2 HDD - my C: drive has my OS (WinXP) and all of my program files on it, and it is wired to the motherboard using a 40 wire IDE cable to the primary IDE port. My other HDD is a SATA drive that is wired to a 2 port SATA card using a 32 bit PCI socket.

    One of the DVD buners needs replacing and I was considering a newer SATA DVD burner wired to the open port that I have on my SATA card. But then I started thinking about other options and which ones would be best for video capture/editing/burning.

    I currently have 2 open 64 bit PCI slots, and 1 open IDE port under the primary and secondary IDE ports that is not labeled. When checking my device manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, it shows a Primary IDE channel, Secondary IDE channel, and a Standard Dual channel PCI IDE controller. So I am assuming this open IDE port that is not labeled is the dual channel controller listed??

    Questions for the PC guru's:

    1. If I change my current C: drive IDE wire from a 40 to a 80 wire will I gain a faster data transfer rate?
    2. Should I invest in a new C: drive and use the open SATA port for this drive?
    3. Should I just replace the bad DVD burner with a new IDE interface and leave all else as is?

    Looking for advice and suggestions on which way to go....

    THX
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  3. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    1. Definitely. It should have been a 80 Wire IDE cable in the first place, the same as your other drives. Whether it will gain you any speed, not sure, but likely. It's a cheap enough improvement, especially if it gives you any performance boost.

    2. Harder decision. Since you mention video, I would probably just add a new large SATA hard drive and leave the 'C' drive as is, except for the cable improvement. You can't have enough HDD space with video. Optionally, you could 'clone' the OS on the 'C' drive to the new SATA drive, but probably not a great performance boost. But running your video edits/encodes between other than your boot drive and and the other new drive would be an improvement. The boot drive is used by the OS quite a bit and that slows encoding performance. I'm guessing you have a spare 3.5" bay for a added drive. I use three HDDs in most of my video encodng PCs. SATA HDDs are fairly energy efficient, so your existing power supply should be fine.

    3. Easiest to replace the PATA (IDE) optical drive with another PATA drive. Just set the jumpers on the new drive the same as the existing drive. PATA and SATA optical drives operate at the same speed, as they are much slower devices than HDDs.

    I would also up your RAM to 2GB and you should gain a bit of performance there. And if you plan to upgrade to Windows 7 in the future, the extra RAM will help. 4GB is even a better option for W7/Vista.

    If you wanted to start over with a newer PC, especially if you plan to work with high definition video, then a fast quad core, SATA drives all around, 4GB RAM and a new OS would give you the greatest performance boost, but much more $$$.
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  4. so if I understand you correctly.....I should:

    Leave my 2 DVD burners on the 80 wire IDE cable, and install a new 3rd HDD using the open SATA port. That way I would have the highest data transfer rate possible on my new SATA root drive (C and my existing SATA capture/storage drive (F

    My exisiting IDE (C drive could then be used for storage or whatever else I need after I copy all the OS and program files over to the new drive.

    Do I have it right?
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  6. DVD Ninja budz's Avatar
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    Make sure to buy a 80 wire ide cable for that new pata (ide) dvd burner. newer dvd burners require them.
    80 wire ide cables are necessary for newer ide dvd burners or they won't work correctly.
    Last edited by budz; 6th Feb 2010 at 17:04.
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  7. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by DirtBikeMike View Post
    so if I understand you correctly.....I should:

    Leave my 2 DVD burners on the 80 wire IDE cable, and install a new 3rd HDD using the open SATA port. That way I would have the highest data transfer rate possible on my new SATA root drive (C and my existing SATA capture/storage drive (F

    My exisiting IDE (C drive could then be used for storage or whatever else I need after I copy all the OS and program files over to the new drive.

    Do I have it right?

    Post using f drive,not f:\ or people will think you are too happy.
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  8. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by DirtBikeMike View Post
    so if I understand you correctly.....I should:

    Leave my 2 DVD burners on the 80 wire IDE cable, and install a new 3rd HDD using the open SATA port. That way I would have the highest data transfer rate possible on my new SATA root drive (C:) and my existing SATA capture/storage drive (F:)

    My exisiting IDE (C:) drive could then be used for storage or whatever else I need after I copy all the OS and program files over to the new drive.

    Do I have it right?
    You would have the best transfer rate between your non-boot drives. I would use the extra space on the boot driive for just archival storage.

    And you can also disable smilies in 'Additonal Options' below your post area when you compose your post, as I did when I added the quote from your post.
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    @dirtbikemike:

    there's an old saying that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or a variant that people might be more familiar with thanks to a certain someone having used it on national tv; you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig.

    in a nutshell your pc was a kick ass pc 6 years ago, but today a low end $200 motherboard/cpu/ram combo would take it to school, as such i wouldn't spend a dime on it. in so far as switching to an 80 wire IDE cable, read this:

    http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html

    in all honesty, i don't think you will see any significant (if any at all) increase in transfer speeds going from the 40 wire to the 80 wire IDE cable, unless the 40 wire cable was holding back the transfer speeds in the first place; transfer speeds are dependent on the chipset, the interface and the hdd itself, you can use an adapter and use a sata cable on a ATA133 pata hdd but that won't increase your transfer rates one bit.

    basically i would spend the least amount possible on that pc, buy the cheapest dvd burner you can find (an oem burner can be had for as little as $20) and call it a day.
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  10. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    The only other upgrade worth doing is putting in another gb of ram,it will free up some swapping when using certain apps.
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  11. thx guys...I really appreciate the help. As it turns out, after reading that article on cables and taking a closer look inside, my HDD (C: drive) is connected with a 80 wire and my DVD has a 40 wire. I do not have any extra money to spend on a new computer so I have to make this one last as long as possible.

    New questions:

    Should I swap the 40 for a 80 on my DVD drive? Will this make any difference?

    Would it make a difference if I bought a new SATA HDD to use as a new C: drive using my open SATA port? I would have to copy or ghost all my data over to the new drive, and then I would have 2 HDD on my SATA card. Does it make sense to upgrade the data transfer rate for the main drive on an older PC?
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  12. contrarian rallynavvie's Avatar
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    I had Tyan 2460, not the 2466 like yours, that I used for video work several years ago. It's been a highly-reliable file server ever since it was retired after the RMA (which is talked about in an old thread on here) and the upgrade to a dual Prestonia Xeon machine. I think some folks here aren't aware of how useful such a machine still is today. However the one major flaw with that line of Tyan boards was the AMD-762 chipset. While it's a powerful chipset it has MANY incompatibilities with expansion cards and newer operating systems. For instance I don't think you can run Vista or Win7 on that chipset so I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade your OS until you've done some research. Mine is running Server 2k3 just fine though.

    Knowing how finicky that system is I'd just replace the burner with a like PATA burner and add leave that extra SATA port for an additional HDD. You're on the right track keeping the OS and apps on their own drive but you'll want a third drive when doing encodes (read the source files from your project drive and write the final video file to the new drive). I ran like that for almost a year with that machine until I added a hotswap bay for backups. I also added a U320 SCSI HBA to mine in order to build up SCSI arrays for scratch disk space and pagefile. I was running 2GB of ECC reg. memory in mine (4x512MB) which was more than enough for most jobs. With how cheap you can find that PC-2100 ECC registered memory you might want to go for 4GB. You'll only see 3.5GB of it but that does not mean the last 512MB is being wasted, it's just being used for system overhead.
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  13. awesome info....thx to everyone for their help...I'm starting to understand now.

    Finally I know why having 3 drives is important for video work. Currently I have only 2 available SATA ports on a 32 bit PCI card and one is being used by my project drive (F: 100gb WD), so I only have 1 open port. That would mean that 1 of the 3 HDD would have to be on a 80 wire IDE connection. Is this OK?, or should I add a new SATA card to one of my open 64bit PCI slots? (I have 2 open) so all 3 drives were SATA controlled?

    I will max out my RAM as suggested....will my motherboard handle 4gigs?
    Last edited by DirtBikeMike; 7th Feb 2010 at 10:23. Reason: spelling error
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  14. contrarian rallynavvie's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by DirtBikeMike View Post
    I will max out my RAM as suggested....will my motherboard handle 4gigs?
    Yes, but like I said above Windows will only see about 3.5GB of the 4GB. That doesn't mean 512MB is being wasted, it's just that Windows can't use it. Don't try to put in 3x1GB and 1x512MB DIMMs either, it won't work with that chipset. It's going to want four matched PC-2100 ECC reg memory modules in there.
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  15. thank you again for the info....one more question..

    Can I get by with one HDD on a 80 wire IDE and the other 2 on a SATA card? If so, how should I set it up?

    main drive C: - SATA

    source files for editing - SATA or IDE

    edited finished project files - SATA or IDE
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  16. contrarian rallynavvie's Avatar
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    Use the extra PATA drive for finished project files since those will be pretty linear writes/reads
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  17. Sorry for the repeated questions, I just want to make sure that I understand completely....this all new to me.

    NEW main HDD (with software and program files) - SATA port 1

    HDD 2 (source files) - SATA port 2 (currently the existing storage drive working fine)

    HDD 3 (destination drive for finished files) primary IDE port on the motherboard. (currently the main drive)

    DVD burner secondary IDE port on the motherboard. (current set up working fine)

    Is this correct?
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  18. contrarian rallynavvie's Avatar
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    Yes.
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  19. excellent....thank you.

    Now I just to determine if my motherboard will allow the boot drive to be on a SATA PCI card. Any suggestions?
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    Originally Posted by DirtBikeMike View Post
    Sorry for the repeated questions, I just want to make sure that I understand completely....this all new to me.

    NEW main HDD (with software and program files) - SATA port 1

    HDD 2 (source files) - SATA port 2 (currently the existing storage drive working fine)

    HDD 3 (destination drive for finished files) primary IDE port on the motherboard. (currently the main drive)

    DVD burner secondary IDE port on the motherboard. (current set up working fine)

    Is this correct?
    Actually, I wouldn't move your OS drive. Keep your OS/programs on that IDE where it is. You'll see little improvment there moving to serial (and that's if your mb will support booting from SATA without playing around or even support it at all).

    Use the two SATA drives as for your video work. Always using one as the source and the other as the destination. The idea is to keep all the reads on one drive and all the writes to the other. Keep in mind temporary files as they are used in your process. You'll get much better I/O throughput keeping all the real work just on the SATA drives. Much betterh than IDE to SATA and vice versa.

    General Process:
    Assuming IDE C:, SATA E:, SATA F: (D: is your DVD?, though other than C:, drive associations mean very little)

    - Capture
    Directly to E:

    - Edit
    From E: to F: (Note: If there's demuxing/muxing going on then it may be better to use E: as source, F: as temp if seperate video/audio streams, then remux back to E:. Even though E: is both source and dest, the intermediate files are created on F:. Again, the goal to to read from one drive, write to another. This example is read/write/write versus read/write.)

    - Author
    From F: to E:

    - Burn
    From E:

    - Archive
    Almost anywhere that's not in your way. Since its archival its only using up space.

    The OS on C:, working with E: and F: keeps your OS and programs isolated from the other work going on. With enough memory (yes, go to at least 2gb with XP...see other posts) you shouldn't see much if any paging/swapping going on.

    The C: drive for the OS is the kicker. I wouldn't worry about program files on other drives if you'd like. They are only loaded into memory once when they are first run. There should be little to no other i/o for the actual program once it started.

    As far as a new burner, whatever you find that's reliable and cheaper. Great deals always going on somewhere. I'd guess you be able to find a good LG, Pioneer, Sony for $20-$25US.
    Have a good one,

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  21. AWESOME INFO....THX TONZ TO EVERYONE!!!!!!!

    I swapped the 40 wire to a 80 wire on my IDE DVD burner yesturday, and my next 2 moves will be maxing out my RAM and adding another SATA drive for a total of three HDD. This should be about it for this old PC until I can afford to upgrade the motherboard.

    Anyone got any good/used DDR memory strips they could sell me?
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    Originally Posted by DirtBikeMike View Post
    Anyone got any good/used DDR memory strips they could sell me?
    i have tons of ddr ram modules sitting around but that won't do you any good, registered/ECC ram is recommended and in fact if you plan on populating all the dimm slots you must use reg/ECC ram:

    http://www.tyan.com/archive/support/html/memory_s2466.html

    check to see what kind of ram you have in there now, if it's unbuffered you can only use DIMM slots 1 and 2.
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  23. I was wrong in my original post. I currently have 2gb RAM with (4) 512mb modules. So I guess I would need (4) DDR PC1200 registered DDR SDRAM modules to upgrade to 4gb RAM. Correct?
    Last edited by DirtBikeMike; 9th Feb 2010 at 14:18. Reason: spelling
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  24. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    Not really sure about the RAM configuration on your MB, but you can look around on Ebay for RAM modules and you might be able to find some for a reasonable price. (Buyer beware.)

    But using XP, you may not see much, if any improvement, at least for encoding. Some programs like Photoshop can make more use of larger amounts of RAM. If the cost seems too high, I would probably just go with the RAM you have at present and save your money up for a new PC some time in the future.
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    Originally Posted by DirtBikeMike View Post
    I was wrong in my original post. I currently have 2gb RAM with (4) 512mb modules. So I guess I would need (4) DDR PC1200 registered DDR SDRAM modules to upgrade to 4gb RAM. Correct?
    you would need 4 1 gig PC2100 registered/ECC modules, not PC1200.
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