IDE Controller Cards

[maveric4001]

Advise needed from all please to avise on what is the best configuration.

A: Two HDD connected to contoller card, both mastered on different channel and Dvd- Rom and DVD writer both mastered to IDE0 and IDE1 respectivly.

B: HDD's on IDE0 and IDE1 and rom and writer on controller card.

Finaly is it considered neccessary to use 2 HDD's to do ripping and writing.

I know a lot of you are really good technical buffs so come on lets have all your comments.

Thanks to all

[808smokey]

If you only have 4 devices. 2 HDD and 2 DVD's then put the HDD on Primary and DVD devices on the Secondary IDE. You don't need a IDE control card

[maveric4001]

Well the reason I thought of for putting in a controller card was I was told that if you are reading and writing up and down the same IDE lead, this can cause problems and it should'nt be done. I have had some trouble lately backing up some DVDs, where the playback pauses and jumps. I have excluded the media as I am using top quality TDK. So it would sugest that its somewhere between the ripping, transcoding, burning that the problem lies.

Interesting enough I did read one of your other comments somewhere where you suggested copy on the fly with writer and rom on the same IDE. Is this normal practice and the prefered method implemented by most.

[808smokey]

I'm not sure I understand what your are trying to do.

Are you going to RIP one disk the HDD and Burn a different file to another disc at the same time??

Or are you copying DISC to DISC.
"On the Fly" from my understanding means it doesn't write to the cache (HDD). It goes straight from one DVD-ROM to the Burner. Which in my experience is faster if both DVD decives are on the same IDE

[redwudz]

maveric4001: There may some confusion here with terminology. Simple rule: Keep high speed devices seperate from low speed devices on the same channel. Don't mix HD's and CD's. I would keep both hard drives on the same channel, your boot as master, your second hard drive as slave. On the other channel you can have your DVD burner as master and your DVD rom as slave. You can reverse this if you have a problem. It works better if your 'Capture' drive is not your boot drive. Best is a small boot drive and a big capture drive so if you have to reformat, it takes less time. If you have more hard drives and more CD, DVD drives than your MB can handle, sure, look into a PCI IDE controller. I have 2 HD's, a RAID, CD, DVD burner, DVD rom and a Zip drive. I had to use another controller for all these and a bigger power supply.

[gmatov]

Someone is screwed up here.

If 2 devices are on the same IDE channel, they "take turns". That will not only slow things down, but without BURNproof, Buffer Underrun, you would make coasters.

In this case, OS drive, Primary Master, DVD-Burner, Primary Slave, Second HDD, Secondary Master, DVD-ROM, Secondary Slave.

In this set up, you rip from the Secondary DVD-ROM to "workspace" on the Pri Master, convert it and save the results to the second HDD, then burn it to the Burner on the Primary as Slave. IDE 0 or 1 to IDE 1 or 2,depending on how they named the IDEs on your board. The same with a controller card.

2 devices on one cable HAVE to wait their turn.

So, if you put both optical devices on the same cable, same thing, take turns,slow down, maybe get under run.

An optical device and a HDD will not slow down to the optical speed. The optical device will transfer at its max data rate when it gets control, and the HDD will transfer at ITS max speed when IT is in control.

Best you should just for the hell of it get an add in card and put all 4 devices on their own channel. That way you could have all 4 talking at the same time and not worry about it.

I do not think that is why you got jerky output on those jobs you mentioned, "prime" TDK media or no.

Cheers,

George

[maveric4001]

Gmatov,

Thanks for that advise, that is what I was looking for. Can you confirm that connecting devises that way causes no problems, I cant really see why it would because you would only be using one of the devises on any given IDE at any one time.
That is why I asked about a controller card, I thought if they were all set as primary on there own lead that that would be best, if I did do that would it be recommended to put both HDDs on the controller card.

Reference the jerky output any Ideas or an opinion. Could it be insufficient cooling.

Cheers

Maveric

[RabidDog]

I beg to differ but what gmatov said is wrong! fairly flat out wrong.
do NOT mix cd-rom (or dvd-rom) with hdd on the same ide channel. Two HDD on the same channel is perfect. Mixing HDD and optical drive on the same channel WILL slow the HDD to the max transfer speed of the cdrom. Two devices on the same channel will "interleave" their data requests and two hard disk drives will experience no slowdown. Howevr when you put a dvdrom and a hard drive on the same channel that whole channel is set to the max transfer speed of the DVDrom drive (at best udma 33). I wont go into the full tech details. The ideal situation IS for all drives to be on their own channel. I personally wouldnt copy on the fly as it can be prone to under-runs etc. In your situation ide0-- 2 hard drives ide1-- 2 optical drives.