HD Master or Slave, does it Matter?

[RickNwd]

Is there any significant advantage to keeping the dedicated capture drive as the secondary master vs. primary slave? I ask this because Cendyne seems to prefer that its 105 DV burner be the secondary master. This will be running under WinXP with ATA133 mb & drives. The CPU is an AMD 2400+, the capture drive is 200G and will be formatted NTFS.

[Dubber]

I'd hook up the two drives to 1st IDE and your burner to the 2nd IDE as a master.

[DigiToast]

What I would do if there isn't a secondary slave yet is set the capture drive on IDE channel 2 instead of 1. All of this is assuming that you have your primary OS installed on the Master of channel 1.

In theory, if two drives are being accessed on the same channel, then they're going to compete for the bandwidth, whereas if you have two disks being accessed over two seperate channels, then you'd be using your hardware most efficiently.

There are advantages and disadvantages to where you place your drive.. whether the placement ultimately makes a significant difference, I wouldn't know, but it's always nice to have peace at heart when you think back on your setup and know that you evaluated everything.

so the advantages and disadvantages as I see things
OS disk + capture disk on same channel
advantages:
copying from either disk to a dvd would result in less fighting for channel bandwidth
faster copying from optical drive to either hard disk
disadvantages:
copy between hard disks would be slower
if both hard disks are being accessed, they would both need to take turns or fight for usage of the channel

capture disk and optic drive on the same channel
advantages:
whilst capturing or using both hard discs at the same time, each hard disk is happier. assuming that you don't use your optical drive during the capture, then it would almost be nonexistant and not using any resources on the channel
copying between OS disk and capture disk would be faster
disadvantages:
copying to and from the optic drive to the capture disk would possibly be hindered

So anyways, a lot of this is all theory, which is what most speed/number ratings for computers are anyways. I have no way to prove or backup what I said (as all this is off the top of my head), but it's my 2 cents worth of input on the topic.

[kitty]

Yes many use the following config: Primary: master OS drive, slave capture drive; Secondary: master DVD burner, slave CD or DVD-ROM drive.

[RickNwd]

Thanks for the help folks. Although I tend to agree with the theoretical argument about shared bandwith, I think I'll keep the DVD burner unit happy and just let it have the secondary master slot to begin with. I can't see the program and operating system being all that busy once capture begins, so as a primary slave the capture drive should be able to "exercise" itself quite aggressively in a shared environment. It is all together now and will be be booting on XP by noon after sequencing the mb bios to boot first on the cd drive.

Thanks again for the input.

[Sonnee]

Why not buy an IDE controller card and install each drive in its own channel? The controller has its own BIOS that offloads data I/O from the CPU allowing it to operate more efficiently.

With newer ATA drives bordering on SCSI performance, this may well be the method of choice for processor intensive applications such as video capture and encoding.

Most cards are backwards compatible and work alongside the motherboards controller giving a total capacity for 8 IDE devices.

Typically a controller card without RAID capability retails for around $30. The boost in performance is well worth the minimal cost.

[Nelson37]

Add-on IDE controller is best solution.

There can be a significant performance loss on a Master - Slave setup if both drives are not of equal performance. Also, periodic OS writes to boot drive can briefly degrade available bandwidth sufficient to cause a large number of frame drops, IF capture drive is on same channel. Newer drives with large cache may eliminate this.

Performance loss with write to DVD on different channel is negligible compared to relatively slow speed of DVD drive. You should be able to use it as Slave on Primary with Cap drive as Master on Secondary, or add the additional controller, and even go Raid in the future.