IDE Cable

[drle81]

I have 2 hard disks and one cd-rom and cd recdorder, so my IDE cables are completely ocupied. What is the best way to connect it on my computer so that I can get better performance? I connected hard disks on primary and cd roms on secondary. (My IDE cables are 80 pin.) Is it better to connect it like one hard disk - one cd rom?

 

[Toejam31]

It really makes very little difference with modern hardware unless the devices on the cable are PIO-mode only. These type of devices shouldn't be on the same cable as a DMA device. Otherwise, the only time a slower device on a cable affects the speed of a faster device is if they are both accessed at the same time. For example, a ATA/66 device on the same cable with an ATA/33 device does not automatically force both devices to be ATA/33 ... they operate independently. Accessing both at the same time <i>will</i> cause the faster device to slow down, but this really only affects the burst rate of the device, which is only noticable when moving large blocks of data.

Many people used to place optical drives on separate cables when copying data from disk to disk in order to avoid buffer-underrun errors, but with the advent of newer technology in CD-RW drives, such as BURN-Proof, this is no longer necessary, and the optical drives are best placed on the secondary IDE.

<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confTiming-c.html" target="_new">Independent Master/Slave Device Timing</A>

Toejam31

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