IDE Connection

[maveric4001]

Can someone please help.

Please can you advise on the prefered method of connecting dvd burner and dvd rom.
First does the burner need to be connected to an IDE 80 cable or an IDE 40 cable or does it just not make a difference.
Does it make any difference if it is set as master or slave, would it make any difference if burner and rom are on the same cable.

Look farward to all comment

[andkiich]

I would check the motherboard manual. Depending on the age of the machine or the motherboard it might make a difference.

[holistic]

" IDE 80 cable " is for ATA66 or better .Optical drives do not have these transfer rates and are best left on the ATA33 channel.

If your motherboard supports it :

Master the DVD burner - IDE0
Master DVD ROM - IDE1
Master Harddrive on ATA66 / 100 / 133 channel(usually a blue socket)

If not then master the DVD burner and Slave the ROM to the same channel

Opticals that are mastered/slaved together will really make no difference. An optical drive on the same channel as a harddrive will though.

][

[MachineMan]

With most mother boards you should be able to hook up 4 devices(CD, DVD, Hard discs), 2 on each cable. Also if you are running WinXP you should not have to configure it to slave or master but to a generic setting (LBA or something) and it will get picked up when you boot the system, although Im not 100% sure about this. If you want more the 4 devices then you will need a special mother board or get a ATA PCI card with more IDE capability.

[ztank]

WinXP will make no difference when detecting slave/master drives. That is a BIOS/motherboard issue.

Most (all?) recent motherboards work fine if you set the jumpers on all drives to "Cable Select". Only with older motherboards do you need to explicitly configure each drive as master and slave.

Just hook them up to the same channel, and if they interfere with each other then buy an IDE controller card. You can test it by trying to read/play a DVD at the same time as burning another DVD.

[maveric4001]

Thanks Guys for the help

[maveric4001]

Holistic

You wrote: Opticals that are mastered/slaved together will really make no difference. An optical drive on the same channel as a harddrive will though.

Can anyone explain why there would be a problem with an optical drive on the same channel as a harddrive

[Saminai]

I've read that it will slow your hard drive down if you do that. The channel will be forced into UDMA 2 mode when your hard drive would prefer UDMA 5 mode

[FOO]

What you want to do if possible is put
hard drives on different IDE controllers
and the burner on a different IDE than the drive where the data to be burned is.

It's hard because of physical cabling though.

So you rip a DVD from the DVD rom (ide1) to C (ide0)
process the data from C to D (ide 1)
burn from D to burner (ide 0)

In each case data can be simultaneously read and written and disk
heads don't have to move.

Data transfers on the same IDE controller are not simultaneous.