dvd configuration with SATA hard drives

[skfle]

when you are running sata hard drives can your dvd drive connect to the primary ide socket on your mb and the dvd burner to the secondary , or do they have to be connected as master and slave? If so, which would be master and to primary or secondary, or does it matter?

 

[emogoch]

It would be better to put the two DVD drives on separate channels (primary & secondary), rather than on the same channel. The reason for this is having them on separate channels will allow them to each use the full bandwidth of that channel, rather than having to share the channel with the other drive. This configuration will also prove beneficial when you're copying directly from disc to disc, rather than making an image on the HDD first.

 

[sunangel]

I agree with the above posts. However, I found that with a dvd drives (or any other drive for that matter) with a cache of 2mb or more, they can reside on the same IDE channel and get along nicely.

I used to burn with Nero on four burners at once back when cache sizes were 512 KB and quite a few times one out of the four would be a bad burn. Today, with the high cache size and underrun technology, the only issues you may encounter is either (1) the northbridge is flooded with data (i.e. surfing and downloading from the net while burning, or transferring data between different HDDs while burning, even using SATAs), (2) bad dvd disks, (3) rouge programs (spyware) fooling around on your system, or (4) an under powered PSU. If you clean your system with a virus/spyware scanner before burns and let the system be while its' burning you can almost count on having clean burns. Like I said before if the disk is bad there is nothing you can do about that. Move over to another brand.

Also, another juicy tid bit for you is if your gonna burn to four at once, it would be nice to have a separte HDD for each dvd drive you have. Data should be burning from separate HDDs. ODD#1=HHD#1, ODD#2=HHD#2, etc., etc. This may be an expensive set up, but it is sure a time saver.

For example, 4 - 80GB HDDs at newegg cost about $55 each. 4 DVD burners cost about $45 each. Four a $400 investment you just cut your burn time by 300 percent. I found this was cool because I could wait till the end of the month to burn all my saved episode and would normally be able to do it in one Saturday morning's time. Now, I was assuming your ripping dvds if you need a dvd burner, if your spaceshifting tv episode cd burners are more than enough to store tv episodes on one cd per episode.

Good luck on your purchase. Don't buy all at one time...unless you want to.