The main reason for separating drives on ide channels
was to allow the secondary channel to run at a different
mode from the primary in case the best mode each drive
could use was not the same.  IDE devices used PIO modes
0 thru 4, and several variations of DMA and UDMA.  Today,
ide channels are capable of supporting mixed modes, so it
is no longer an issue.  The question you asked has always
seemed to me something only a benchmark could answer, in
real life I could never tell if a system had a slave disk,
or two masters.  If you use the cdrom extensively, I guess
your present setup is probably best.  I would, however, enter
CMOS setup and inspect my ide settings.  Typically, in your
era of pc bios, there were several user-configurable settings
in cmos, 32 bit mode, PIO, and block mode.  Of these, 32 bit
mode can cause the most trouble, if your drive doesn't support
it.  It also seemed to me to add the least performance.  I
vaguely remember hearing that Windows bypasses this part of
the bios anyway when it loads its own ide drivers.  PIO,
on the other hand, can make a huge difference, if you increase
it from a cautious default of 2, say, to a maximum of 4.  I
used to set block mode to auto, but you can try 16 if your cmos
has more than just an off and on option.  Of all the drives
I remember, I had only one larger than 400 meg that ran at PIO 3,
a Maxtor 850.  Everything else larger than 400 ran at pio 4.
In case you didn't guess, udma is better than PIO, if your bios
or ide adapter supports it.
Tom Turak


-----Original Message-----
From: Frank R. Brown [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 9:54 AM

I have an old P6 180 MHz micron machine.

Some time ago I added a second hard drive to it.  My intention
at the time was to make the second drive the master on the
second ide controller, and make the cd-rom the slave on
the second controller, leaving the original drive as the master
on the first controller.

However, the cable was a little too short for this, so as an
expedient, I put the second drive as the slave on the first
controller, leaving the cd-rom in splendid isolation on the
second controller.

I'm wondering now how much benefit I might gain from
going back and putting the second drive on the second
controller.  If I did that, would there be benefits to putting
specific things (e.g., the pagefile) on the second drive?

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                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>