Second hard drive: primary slave or secondary master?

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

I am adding a second hard drive to my PC (a Dell PIII running Win98SE).
I use this PC for editing and I am adding the second hard drive so that
I write to a drive without the OS (and other clutter) on it. I use
Win98SE on this PC because some of my software is not supported by
WinXP.

I also have a CD/burner that is currently the secondary master.

Should I hook up the 2nd hard drive as the primary slave, leaving the
boot/OS drive as primary master and leaving the CD/burner as secondary
master, or should I make the 2nd hard drive the secondary master (and
if I do that, should the CD/burner be the slave on the primary or
secondary motherboard connection?)

The Maxtor documentation lists installing the 2nd hard drive as primary
slave as the "typical" approach, but is that optimal for audio?

Thanks for any experience-based input.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Thanks, Jerry

I have this thing tweeked to the max. The only thing that I had not
already done was add the second hard drive.

Since I need the burner, I will move it to be the primary slave.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 19:02:08 GMT, "Jerry Gerber"
<jerrysgerber@earthlink.net> wrote:

>Make the 2nd drive the secondary master, and don't attach a zip or CD burner
>to the secondary slave as this will slow down your audio functions.

I don't understand this. Why is that.

it seams I have everything other way arround in my system.
80GB Maxtor as primary master (in a cady), with CDR/W as a slave
80GB WD as secondary master and ASUS DVD R/W as a slave.
System is on WD
This is all physically, in BIOS, however, I can give instructions to
make whatever be 1st or 2nd disc.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Rob: what you suggested was what I wanted to do: make the CD/RW the
slave on the primary with the new HD as master on the secondary.

When I opened up the Dell, I was in for a bit of work. This (Dimension
L550r PIII) design has the factory-equiped hard drive sitting upright
(it's a tower) in the front, right behind the bezel. That HD is hooked
up to the mother board by a single connector cable about 5 inches long.
No way to use that cable for a slave drive (but it is a short run, so
makes some sense if that is the only hard drive).

Also, the factory hard drive (a Western Digital, BTW) is about 12
inches from the open 3.5 bay (where I need to put the new hard drive)
so even using a new standard cable, I can't put the old and new hard
drives on the primary together.

So I left the old HD as the primary, with no slave. I then installed
(had no choice) the new hard drive as secondary master with the CD/RW
as secondary slave. The CD/RW drive is a 5.25 drive in the top bay,
with the open 3.5 bay immediately below it. I had to twist the cord
into a double dipsy-doodle backflip to get the HD as master (both the
PC and the Maxtor documentation say to set it up as "cable-select" and
not to have a CD drive as master over a hard drive).

Later I'll see how it works for burning CDs. I suppose I can always
write to the new hard drive and then later copy a finished file to the
original HD before I burn a CD.

Anyone who can point out obvious stupidity in what I am doing, please
do. One of the aidio "tweeks" I made on this PC gave me booting
problems until I reset the msconfig file to load everything on boot. Am
I correct in assuming that I don't really need to worry about what
loads on boot anymore because I am writing to a separate drive? Lord
knows what was missing upon boot up from the tweeked version of the
msconfig file, but the machine (that worked fine using those tweeks and
one hard drive) did NOT like that msconfig file with the second hard
drive.

All seems fine now.

By the way, there is a nice listing of tweeks over at ProSoundWeb.com
Speaking of which, do you all set your swap file/"virtual memory at a
set size equal to your systems physical installed RAM (as I do) or
double it (as the ProSoundWeb site reccommends?)

Last question I am strongly considring adding a controller card for the
new hard drive as suggested earlier in the thread. Do those controllers
ever cause conflicts?

Thanks, everyone.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

<bjacoby@iwaynet.net> wrote in message
news:1109048722.823756.140400@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com

> Yes. A controller card can be a HUGE advantage. In my machines I
> measure about a 2-5x increase in hard disk transfer rates over the
> controler on the motherboard (running win 2000)

That very much depends on the motherboard. A good modern motherboard and a
good modern external card just might have the same had drive controller
chips in them. Agreed though that while legacy PCs can be effective audio
tools, their controllers can be very substandard by modern standards.

> The odd thing is that BOTH controlers claim to have the same specs.
> Clearly NOT the case!

I believe PC advertising specs just as much as I believe audio specs,
particularly mic and speaker specs.

> I'm using the Promise Ultra 133 TX2 cards... cheap! (see computergate).

Pricewatch shows them at $35-40. Cheap enough!


> But the advice about booting from a card controller is
> right on. One of my machines boots OK from a drive run by card but
> the other one simply REFUSES to boot unless the main drive is run off
> the motherboard controllers. Who knows why?

IME the BIOS on a motherboard can be counted on to be very agressive about
making just about anything boot, while controller cards often make a lot of
simplifying assumptions that leave some drives out in the cold. Also, its
bad to assume that a hard drive is free from technical defects just because
it works in some PC.

> But the external controller REALLY kicks serious butt on large audio
> file transfers.

The most complex DAW I ever built had 3 PCI HD controllers with two drives
each, in addtion to the controller on the motherboard. the boot drive was
mirrored, and the rest of the drives on RAID controllers were striped. The
motherboard IDE controlers were relegated to handling optical drives. It
screamed!

When I do it again, I'll probably go wall-to-wall mirrored, as hard drive
failure is a pretty common thing these days, and under some conditions
mirrored is almost as fast as striped. Big drives are now cheap enough that
mirroriing doesn't really hold you back much.