Hard drive issues / capturing

[kakkerlakk]

Hi all,

I just purchased a new WD hard drive with the 8mb cache to improve my capturing capabilities.

Now, my question is, i also have an older 60 gig 5400 rpm hard drive. If i were to connect that to my secondary IDE on the slave setting, would it slow down my new drive in any way. I'll basically be using the older drive for storage, no programs will run from it, and nothing will be encoded/captured to it.

I'll have it set up like so...

Primary Master > WD 80 gig w/8mb cache
Primary Slave> Pioneer A05
Secondary Master > LiteOn CD-RW
Secondary Slave > 60 gig 5400 (if possible)

I'm running a 1.7 Celeron (OC'd to 2.25), 512 meg DDR ram, on an Aopen motherboard, with w2k.

Thanks.
kakk

[Martok]

Keep your hard drives separate from your CD/DVD drives , that's where you'll get the biggest slowdown.

It's best to capture to a drive that has no OS or programs.

[kakkerlakk]

Okay, so by putting the new 80 gig hard drive on the same IDE channel as the slower 60 gig hard drive, will that slow down the newer 80 gig drive, or not really effect the performance of it at all???

I'm just wondering if its worth hooking up the older 60 gig drive at all.

[lrosado]

That depends, if you put two drives on the same ide channel and both hard drives are, for example, dma-33,66,100 then no slow down in performance. RPM's really dont have that much of an impact in my experience. Now If one drive is dma-33 and the other dma-66 or 100 then you will see the faster drive slow down to the pace of the slower drive. My suggestion is get a controller card and put each drive and cdrw on it's own separate ide channel and you will see a dramatic speed increase.

[mustang581]

kakkerlakk,
having the two drives on the same ribbon does not slow the performance of the drives individually. you will only see performance issues if you are tranferring files back and forth between the two drives as it will only transfer as fast as the slowest one.
I would recommend the following setup:

Primary Master > 60 gig 5400
Primary Slave> Pioneer A05
Secondary Master > WD 80 gig w/8mb cache
Secondary Slave > LiteOn CD-RW

or: Capture on SecMaster > Encode to PrimMaster > burn DVD Pioneer
Primary Master > 60 gig 5400
Primary Slave> LiteOn CD-RW
Secondary Master > WD 80 gig w/8mb cache
Secondary Slave > Pioneer A05