Two harddrives on one IDE

[wellmashed]

I have two IDE ports and have my cd-r on one on its own.
The other has my harddrive as master and cd rom drive as slave.

I want to add another harddrive and what I want to know is can I put the two harddrives and the cd rom drive on the same IDE cable and leave the cd-r on its own because I am told that a cd writer works best on its own.

If not then does anyone know the best combination to put all four on the two seperate ribbons.

Any help much appreciated.

[VidGuy]

No, you can't do that - you can only put two IDE drives on a port - one as master and one as slave.

Probably just put the CD-Writer as master and one of the hard disks as slaves - that way the Writer will take precedence, although I don't think it really matters much.

However, I run this way and have never had a problem.

[kinneera]

Your two hard drives should be on one IDE channel, and your two CD drives on the other. The maximum number of devices per IDE channel is two. You never want to put a hard drive and CD drive on the same channel, and you especially don't want to make the hard drive a slave to the CD-ROM, because CD drives run much slower, and the master device on the channel will set the access mode for the channel, thus bottlenecking your hard drive to the same speed as your CD-ROM!

[d4n13l]

I have two IDE ports and have my cd-r on one on its own.
The other has my harddrive as master and cd rom drive as slave.

I want to add another harddrive and what I want to know is can I put the two harddrives and the cd rom drive on the same IDE cable and leave the cd-r on its own because I am told that a cd writer works best on its own.

If not then does anyone know the best combination to put all four on the two seperate ribbons.

Any help much appreciated.

Put your two HDDs on the primary IDE channel. Set one as master and one as slave.
Put the two CD drives on the secondary IDE channel. Set one as master and one as slave.

Kinneera is right. By putting your HDD on the same channel as a CDROM or CDRW you will hamper the HDD performance by a considerable amount. IDE always works at the speed of the lowest common denominator in the IDE chain.

[wellmashed]

Ok peeps.

To set the record straight I would never set the cd rom as master over h/drive. Suicide springs to mind.

Sorry VidGuy but your outta here.
If you read my post and realise I have my h/drive as master anyway.
Cd rom/writer first. Hmmmpfffff. No thanks.

Kinneera & d4n13l ....If I put my cd rom and writer on the same IDE am I not asking for trouble when copying 'On The Fly'.

Would it not be better to put ....ready for this......

Primary IDE..harddrive (C drive) as master and cd rom as slave........

Secondary IDE...harddrive (D drive) as master and cd-r as slave........

Thoughts please....

I haven't accuired the second harddrive yet but I am visiting Bowlers tomorrow and hope to pick up a sizeable one at a decent price.....

[kinneera]

Only if you want your hard drive to run really slow! If your recorder supports burnproof or similar technology, don't worry about on-the-fly disc copying. It probably will run slower, but slower CD copying is certainly preferable to having a hard drive run at 6MB/s max. Either that, or just do images for CD copying.

[d4n13l]

"Kinneera & d4n13l ....If I put my cd rom and writer on the same IDE am I not asking for trouble when copying 'On The Fly'. "

If you want to make the best copies possible then you shouldnt copy "on the fly".

I have two HDD drives on my primary EIDE chanel and a CDRW + DVDROM on the secondary; it works a lot better that way and that is the way that you are recommended to do it. Trust me, you want your HDDs both on the Primary channel and your CD drives on the Secondary channel.
EIDE devices will work at the speed of the lowest common denominator in the chain. Therefore by putting a CD ROM and a HDD on the same channel, it will hamper the performance of the HDD.
There is nothing to gain by putting each CD drive on the same channel as a HDD when doing "on the fly" copies, if anything it will make matters worse.

[kinneera]

"There is nothing to gain by putting each CD drive on the same channel as a HDD when doing "on the fly" copies, if anything it will make matters worse.

Well...in theory putting them on seperate channels would improve on-the-fly performance. Since only one IDE device can communicate on the channel at a time, when two devices on the same IDE channel want to talk, it has to constantly switch off, which reduces the performance of both devices while they are talking to eachother. Nonetheless, this is an exceedingly minor consideration compared to the kind of performance reduction your hard drives would experience if they were chained to CD drives. So don't do it.

[wellmashed]

Ok no prob.
Thanks for the advice.

I went out today and got a 40 gig seagate and then put my 4.3 as master and the 40 as slave on one IDE.

I put the cd rom as master and the writer as slave on the other IDE.

The only problem I have now is to get the 40 gig to be recognised I had to place a jumper on the 'restrict to 32 gig' pins and so now I only have 32 gig out of the 40 gig capacity.

I presume this is because windows (ME) only recognises 32 gig partitions.

Is there any way of getting the rest back on another partition?

[kinneera]

As long as you have a hardware jumper on, nothing you do in software is going to get you those 8GB back. So first thing is to take that jumper off. Then, I would suggest a third party partitioning and/or formatting tool such as PartitionMagic. WindowsME has no problem recognizing more than 32GB, but since people keep saying it does, I can only presume that drive formatting from within Windows itself causes problems.

[d4n13l]

"There is nothing to gain by putting each CD drive on the same channel as a HDD when doing "on the fly" copies, if anything it will make matters worse.

Well...in theory putting them on seperate channels would improve on-the-fly performance. Since only one IDE device can communicate on the channel at a time, when two devices on the same IDE channel want to talk, it has to constantly switch off, which reduces the performance of both devices while they are talking to eachother. Nonetheless, this is an exceedingly minor consideration compared to the kind of performance reduction your hard drives would experience if they were chained to CD drives. So don't do it.

I thought it would cause more trouble because if the HDDs were accessed whilst the CDR was being burnt, there is a bigger margin for a failure to occur: When a CD is being burned (on the fly - disk to disk), it is possible that any fairly big HDD access can cause the burn to fail - I would have thought it less likely if the HDDs were on a seperate channel as they wouldnt 'lock up' the secondary channel. Sometimes whilst burning, even small actions can cause a lot of HDD thrashing. It doesnt make any difference anyway, like you said. Keeping the HDDs on the same channel is the wisest thing to do.

BTW wellmashed, It is always better to image the disk first before copying it anyway, I wouldnt recommend disk to disk copying.

[wellmashed]

When I first put the h/drive in there was no way my pc was detecting it by any method.

I went through everything in bios and there was no way.

As soon as I put the jumper on it recognised it.

I was then able to do a low level format then fdisk then format.

So now it is there can i take off the jumper and find the rest of it??

[d4n13l]

No. It may be that your BIOS needs an update, read your BIOS manual. Some BIOS's cant recognize large drives and need to be updated. Make sure that your BIOS is capable of accessing large drives.

[wellmashed]

Ok thanks.

I'm off to find my motherboard manual then.

If i'm not back tommorrow then I have fried my bios lol.

[wellmashed]

Not fried it yet coz I can't find my mobo book......

It's around somewhere though.

[TIbrO]

If you know the manufacturer of your mobo then just go to their site and get the manual in .PDF format. Most mobo manufacturers have their latest edition of the manuals up at their site.