On 22 Sep 98 at 13:59, Richard Micko wrote:

> The contestants: WesternDigital 38400 8.4GB IDE UDMA2 Hard Disk, BTC 36X IDE
> UDMA2 CD-ROM, and a Iomega Zip IDE Mode0 drive.
>
> What is the best configuration regarding which ports to connect what to, if
> any.  In the past I simply put the hard disk on the primary IDE and the
> CD-ROM on the secondary IDE ports.   However, with more devices coming in
> IDE flavors, I am wondering if there are any rules of thumb for the best
> configurations/performance regarding the devices.  I am interested in a
> specific answer for this configuration, but I would really like the "why",
> if there are any rules of order.


  This used to be an issue, but several things have changed in newer
components, any of which takes care of it:

1.  The CD-ROM supports UDMA2 -- even though that's an order of
magnitude more bandwidth than any mass-market CD drive on this planet
can actually use.  Therefore your CD-ROM drive won't prevent your
hard drive from using UDMA2.

2.  If your motherboard actually supports UDMA (most current boards
do), it probably also allows different devices on each EIDE channel
to use different modes.  Therefore your CD-ROM drive won't prevent
your hard drive from using UDMA2.
  In this case, similar reasonong extends to any additional IDE
devices you may want to add in future.

David G

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