On an Utra DMA IDE Bus the bus speed will be that of the slowest device
on the bus. If you put a high performance ATA100 hard drive on the
primary with a CD Rom drive that bus will operate at the speed of the CD
ROM drive. The only performance over a DMA33 hard drive that you will
see is from the disk rotation of the ATA100 drive 5400 or 7200 rpm.

If you need all 3 ancillary drives that you mentioned I suggest another
I/O option for one of them (USB 2.0 or purchase a cheap SCSI card and
SCSI Zip drive).  If I were designing the PC you are discussing I would
eliminate the CD Drive and go with a CDRW and Zip on the secondary
channel. If you're copying cd's best performance is had by telling your
burn software to copy the cd to your hard disk first and burn from
there. Be sure that the CDRW is the Master and Zip is Slave. If you are
using an Intel motherboard you can install Intel Application Accelerator
software and gain granular control of the IDE Bus (tweak the bus
characteristics). I've used this to solve CDROM problems similar to
those I see listed here from time to time (like audio cd's not playing
on some cdrom drives under win 98 etc.)

Harold Bush
Chief Technologist
Vox 845.679.5190
[log in to unmask]
digitalBRANDStm


-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of apiscopo
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2003 10:29 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Please Vote On This IDE Question(Thanks)


It has always troubled me as to how best arrange 4 items on
the Primary and Secondary IDE buses.  We all agree that
the Hard Drive should be the Master on the Primary IDE bus. But, what
about the other 3 things a PC can have (all internal): a Zip Drive, a
CD-ROM, and a CD-R.  Which, in your opinion,
based on your experience, have you found to work the best.
In anticipation of some questions:
  I am running Windows 2000 Pro., 800 Mhz, 256 MByte RAM.
  Just a good generic clone. thanks, in advance of your response.
p.s.  I promise to post the results of your responses.
Armond Piscopo
[log in to unmask]

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