As additional information, about a year ago this group had a discussion on
how to organize multiple drives to have optimum performance. The consensus,
as I remember, resulted in two GUIDELINES (assuming the normal setup of
having the fastest and most often used hard drive being the C drive):

1) Organize the drives to have the least conflicts in communications with
the C drive.
2) Don't have two hard drives with different ADA speeds on the same channel
since the controller will normally communicate with both hard drives at the
slower speed. (Some newer controllers can recognize and use individual
speeds on the same channel.)(CD & DVD drives have a different communication
protocol from hard drives and do not affect the speed of communication with
the hard drives.)

As an example, I have two computers. One I use and I built as a relatively
high performance machine. The other is for the grandchildren when they visit
and is built from left over parts and purchased used parts. On my computer,
my IDE0 channel has my C drive (ADA 100) as the master and a DVD player as
the slave. I rarely use the DVD at the same time as the C drive. My IDE1
channel has my D drive (ADA 100) as the master and a CD-RW as the slave.
Both the D drive and the CD-RW are often used in conjunction with the C
drive. On the other computer, the IDE0 channel has the C drive (ADA 100) as
the master with no slave and the IDE1 channel has the D drive (ADA 33) as
the master and a CD-ROM as the slave.

This message is not meant to begin a new discussion on drive organization as
there are many exceptions to the previously stated GUIDELINES. The last
discussion was rather extensive.

On one machine, I had to designate cable selection to have the drives
properly recognized and ,on the other machine, the master/slave settings on
the drives as well as the channel they are on sufficed without having to
designate cable selection. I assume the individual controller BIOS
determines how it needs to be done. I use all 80/40 IDE cables since the
controller will use the added capacity to the maximum extent possible.

Tom Mayer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Suszka" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 8:15 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Master hampered by slave?


Ian Porter wrote:
> My question - if I hook up a recent model 16x DVD drive as slave to my
> HDD, (which is on an 80 wire cable)  am I likely to hamper the HDD's
> performance in any way?

To the best of my knowledge no it shouldn't. It would be like adding
anything else to the mix. You could always to a performance test before and
after to see if there would be a drop.

> I'd prefer to use the DVD on IDE0 if possible

Don't think you can do this. The primary drive has to reside in the IDE 0
slot with the DVD being IDE 1 if on the primary IDE connection or you may
have a boot situation where the system can't find the OS. Have you tried
cable select for the hardware?

The raid thing is nice but as you said, it does slow things down with boot
up. Besides, if you were running a information critical business Raid would
be the way to go due to the speed. One drive and read the other could write
or you could mirror the bag in case of a system crash.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
[log in to unmask]

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