IDE Drive Set Up

[Magua]

I am trying to set up my drives for maximum speed DVD Shrink/Nero DVD backups.

System Specs:
Athlon 2800+ (stock speed)
Radeon 9800Pro
1024mb PC3200 RAM
120gb 7200rpm WD HD

I have three optical drives (all three in the installed, only 2 plugged in) and one hard drive. The three opticals are a Plextor 52x CD-RW, Plextor 708A DVD Burner, and a cheapo $40 sony 16x dvd rom. I think I would want the DVD Burner and DVD Rom on one IDE (since I don't backup 'on the fly') and the Hard Drive/CD-RW on the other. That way the ripping process and burning process are drawing from both IDE's. My problem is the ribbon cable length. The HD is installed on the front, bottom, and the drives install at the top. Plugging in the HD dosent leave enough cable to reach a top optical drive.

So...is the above set up the best? and if so is there some sort of IDE cable extention (will it seriously degrade speed/quality?) so I wouldn't have to get a PCI IDE card and run off that?

Secondly, if I only stuck with having 2 drives plugged in, what would be the best set up? I would guess it would be the DVD burner/DVD Rom...and just use the DVD Burner to do my CD burns (no cheap media can even take 52x anyways).

Currently DVD Shrink deep analysis and encoding take about 45 minutes each, and burning takes 10-15mins. Total backup process around an hour and 40 mins....I would like to get this down a little.

Thanks

[wulf109]

Never place CD/DVD drive on the same cable as a hard drive. That will slow down the HD for all operations. Your HD is ATA100 or 133,your CD/DVD is ATA33,you will slowdown your HD to ATA33. A better way would be a second HD. Rip to one HD,then compress to the second HD,that way your HD doesn't have to "hunt" for data during compression.

[scottvf]

My setup is Sony crx300a (DVD-Rom/CD-RW) Master, Sony Dru510a (DVD-RW) Slave on Secondary
2 hard drives on Primary
2 other hard drives on a addon card ATA/133
And 1 hd on sata connection.

Total= 2 optical drives & 5 Hard drives

I haven't had any problems with this setup.

[Magua]

Alright, I don't really want to get an IDE PCI card, so I will stick to two optical drives. Would ripping from the DVD-ROM drive then burning with the DVD-+RW drive increase the speed of the total process much (The DVD-ROM is 16x, I believe the RW drive is 12x) compared to ripping and burning from the RW drive? Also, is the amount of wear on the RW drive worth considering?

[doublejack]

Never place CD/DVD drive on the same cable as a hard drive. That will slow down the HD for all operations. Your HD is ATA100 or 133,your CD/DVD is ATA33,you will slowdown your HD to ATA33.

This is not correct. In the old PIO mode days yes putting an optical drive on the same cable as a HD would slow the HD down. However, the ATA standard does not impose this limitation. If you have an ATA100 HD and an ATA33 DVD-ROM on the same cable with an ATA100 controller the HD *will* operate at the full ATA100 speed. Only the DVD-ROM will transfer at ATA33 if that is its max speed. This is how I have my PC configured and I have no loss in HD performance at all.

[bottle-necked]

doublejack, why would you have both your drives on one IDE channel when your profile show that you only have 2 drives total? That makes little sense

[doublejack]

doublejack, why would you have both your drives on one IDE channel when your profile show that you only have 2 drives total? That makes little sense

Easy, I have 2 comps. In my profile is the PC I use for DVD work. It's got my LG 4040B and the faster processor. My other PC which is an Athlon 1.4 has 3 drives: the HD (ATA100), an 8X DVD-ROM (ATA33) both on the same channel, and a 24X CDRW drive on the other IDE channel by itself.

The second PC I use for testing my DVDs, occassional ripping (when I plan to make a VCD/SVCD from a DVD) and for burning CDs. I have the two optical drives on different channels to get better performance when going disc-to-disc when burning CDs. Make sense?

-edit
Just wanted to add that I actually have 4 working desktop computers and 2 laptops, however a few of those are quite old now. So the only ones I use daily are the 2 Athlon desktops. My P2 laptop just collects dust... has been that way since I finished up my degree.

[scottvf]

Alright, I don't really want to get an IDE PCI card, so I will stick to two optical drives. Would ripping from the DVD-ROM drive then burning with the DVD-+RW drive increase the speed of the total process much (The DVD-ROM is 16x, I believe the RW drive is 12x) compared to ripping and burning from the RW drive? Also, is the amount of wear on the RW drive worth considering?

I rip with the dvd rom. The dvdrw is 16x read but only rips at 4x max while the dvdrom hit 16x. Takes 1/2 hour to rip on my dvdrw and only 5-10 min on the dvd rom. I also feel less wear on the dvdrw this way. Since the dvd rom/cdrw was only 80.00 and the dvd rw was 300, why put wear and tear on the more expensive one.

[Magua]

Strange...

Now i have the DVD ROM and DVD RW Drive hooked up. I planned on ripping with the ROM drive, and burning with the RW. I started DVD Shrink, and when it started analysis (I always do deep analysis) it was considerably slower than when I do it with the RW. The DVD ROM was analyzing at around 1700 KB/s the RW is usualy around 2500-2700 KB/s. I canceled it, and just did the whole process with the RW drive.

Any ideas why this would happen? and if anyone could let me know what their standard speeds of their analyzing and encoding are with DVD Shrink for comparison purposes.

[doublejack]

I always rip to the HD first before doing the analysis. If you have the HD space that method may be the quickest from start to finish. From the HD my analysis rate is anywhere from the 5k range up to 8 or 9k depending on the content.