2 IDE channels speed degraded?

Szentigrade

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Sep 19, 2004
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I have heard that you are not suppose to put 2 hard drives on one IDE channel because it will slow them both down. I was wondering what kind of performance loss i would see? I would do alot of large file transfers from drive to drive. I plan to do this with 2 200GB 7200RPM, 8MB cache drives. My 200GB drive is slowly dying and i need a new one to back up the data, but it works fine most of the time so i figure ill keep using it for unimportant data. (oddly enough the click click sound that the hard drive makes when it wont boot, goes away when i hit the tower rite where the harddrive sits?)
 

khha4113

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I have been using 2 HD on my Primary channel (120GB WD for W2k and 80GB Hitachi, WinXP), and haven't noticed any performance loss.

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Crashman

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The only performance loss you see from connecting two hard drives to the same channel happens when you're copying files from one hard drive to the other. That difference is much less noticeable with 8MB cache drives than with 2MB cache drives. Would you like me to explain why?

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Szentigrade

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Yes please explain, however the hard drive i currently own, has a 8MB cache as well as the one i plan to buy, i imagine i will have to copy about....90GB from this hard drive just in case it decides to die and i lose all my stuff,...how long do u think that would take?

Also this one seems to stop responding very frequently, if it is hooked up to a 2 drive system, when it does...wil i have to restart the whole computer or can i continue to work on the new, or could i just restart the one bad drive, i dont plan to run anything off it, its just for storage.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by szentigrade on 09/21/04 06:59 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
 

Crashman

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When you have 2 drives on the same cable, the controller only accesses 1 at a time. Files are cached from one, then written to the other, then cached again, then written again. If you have more drive cache, the drive can fill the cache while the other drive is being written to.

Drives generally transfer 30MB/s to 60MB/s from the internal platters. So having larger drive cache should allow the drives to better keep the bus full.

The best solution is to have the drives on separate cables then, but having more cache should reduce the performance loss of having them on the same cable.

This could be seen better on very slow drives, such as CDRW's, where drives with less cache would run out of data (Buffer Underrun) and cause failed burns. But the same concept applies to hard drives, in this case only affecting performance.

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