pri/sec IDE channels and multiple hard/optical drives

[bobogs]

I have two internal IDE hard drives (40gb master, 120gb slave) on my primary IDE channel, and two optical drives (DVDRW master, CDRW slave) on my secondary channel.

I haven't performed any benchmark tests, but it just seems like things have slowed down lately. The optical drives spin up slowly, and copying a 4gb file from d: to c: takes over 15 minutes. I realize that fragmentation on the hard drives can cause slowness, and I try to keep them defragged using diskeeper.

Q: Would there be any pracitcal benefit of having the IDE channels set up as HD master and optical slave?

I use this pc for everyday tasks and my video/image editing and dvd authoring.

Thanks!
Gary

[lumis]

here is how i would set it up.

PM: 40gb
SM: CDRW
SM: DVDRW
SS: 120GB

do you have dma on?

[bobogs]

I do have DMA on for all four parts of the two channels.

PM: mode 5 (40gb HD)
PS: mode 5 (120gb HD)
SM: mode 4 (DVDRW)
SS: mode 2 (CDRW)

So, even though the 120gb HD is used for video editing projects, it's ok as a slave to the DVDRW?

Thanks for the reply.

Gary

[budz]

I would set it up like this:

PRIMARY MASTER 40 gb hard drive
PRIMARY SLAVE 120 gb hard drive
SECONDARY MASTER DVDRW
SECONDARY SLAVE CDRW

Having a hard drive and optical drive on the same ide channel will slow down the hard drive. If you were considering doing on the fly copying all you would need to do is make sure the read speed of the cdrw is double of the burn speed of the dvdrw. For example cdrw read speed would be 16x, the dvdrw burn speed would be 8x speed. Just my 2 cents!!!!

[budz]

check your pc for spyware if your pc is slowing down.

[waheed]

I would use:

PM: 40GB HDD (With OS Installed)
PS: DVDRW
SM: 120GB HDD
SS: CDRW

Im not sure if budz is correct in stating that:

Having a hard drive and optical drive on the same ide channel will slow down the hard drive.

If you do alot of video editing or encoding, it would be set to work from one hard drive to the other and have them on different channels.

[edDV]

I'd get a PCI disk controller card and put the 120GB capture disk there.

http://www.promise.com/product/segment_lv2list.asp?segment=Non-RAID%20HBAs

Like this one
http://shopping.yahoo.com/search;_ylc=X3oDMTFmb3RyMTdhBF9TAzk2MDc5MjYwBGsDcHJvbWlzZSB1...omise+ultra133

[Richard_G]

It may be different with modern motherboards, but it always used to be the case that an IDE channel would only run at the speed of the slowest component on that channel. I'd go with Budz, in fact that is exactly how my machine is set up and has no problems. If it has slowed right down, I would also suspect spywear or something else hogging your resources.

[BlueWeasel]

I don't think current hardware suffers from the older limitations regarding the slowest drive on a channel.

Putting a HD on the same channel as a DVD/CDRW won't lower the speed of the HD of the optical drives.

Having 2 HDs on a single channel means they have to share bandwidth. If you're looking to increase the performance between the two HDs, then the best setup would be to have each one on a separate channel.

[lumis]

I don't think current hardware suffers from the older limitations regarding the slowest drive on a channel.

Putting a HD on the same channel as a DVD/CDRW won't lower the speed of the HD of the optical drives.

Having 2 HDs on a single channel means they have to share bandwidth. If you're looking to increase the performance between the two HDs, then the best setup would be to have each one on a separate channel.

exactly.. and i'm not entirely sure its beneficial to have the DVDRW as a master, but i doubt its very detrimental either.

[smearbrick1]

I would set it up like this:

PRIMARY MASTER 40 gb hard drive
PRIMARY SLAVE 120 gb hard drive
SECONDARY MASTER DVDRW
SECONDARY SLAVE CDRW

Having a hard drive and optical drive on the same ide channel will slow down the hard drive. If you were considering doing on the fly copying all you would need to do is make sure the read speed of the cdrw is double of the burn speed of the dvdrw. For example cdrw read speed would be 16x, the dvdrw burn speed would be 8x speed. Just my 2 cents!!!! :)

You got my vote!!