posted
I just bought a barebones computer system, and I'm in the process of putting it together from seperate components from my old PC.
I have two hard drives and two dvd/cd drives.
My new PC has two IDE controllers and I also have an ATA 133 pci card from my old PC because it only had one IDE controller.
I'm wondering what the best way to set things up. Best being 'most efficient'. Should I use the two controllers on the motherboard and set up a primary master and slave and secondary master and slave? Or using the pci controller card should I set up each drive on a seperate IDE channel?
posted
Put the CD/DVD drives on a seperate IDE channel from the HDDs. Put your boot hard drive on the the first channel, as the master (make sure the settings/switches on the drive itself reflect this too).
Don't use the PCI card, it's superfluous unless you get another drive.
posted
Thanks Bok. So what are the relative benefits of having something set as a master as opposed to a slave? Or having things on the same channel? Does that latter allow faster transfer/access between the two components?
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Transfer is faster between the channels, which is why you want your CD drive on the opposite channel as your hard drive.
If I were you, I'd put each hard drive as master on its own channel (boot drive as primary master) and whatever optical drive you use primarily for burning as slave on the channel opposite the hard drive that you would primarily burn files from.
In any case, the performance gain wouldn't be much over what Bokonon suggested.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Well, as Nato implied, it depends on what you have on each hard drive, what you use each optical drive for, and how you use both in combination (read/write from where, to where). My setup is one that would likely get 90% of the performance, 90% of the time, but Nato has outlined at least one way to squeak out some possible extra performance, based on usage.
For instance, if you always are playing a CD (music or otherwise), odds are you want to do something more like my suggestion. However, if you do a lot of burning, particularly from one particular hard drive to one particular CD-writer, then something like what Nato suggested would get you better performance for that task.
posted
hmm...well, my one hard drive has the operating system and all programs. the other hard drive has all my music, movies, video files, stuff like that. I burn discs probably equally from both drives.
I think i'll just group the hard drives together, and then the dvd drives together. Easier that way.
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posted
Just remember, a lot of hard drives and CD-drives that use IDE require some changing of "switches" on the back to match up with where they are on the interface (primary vs. secondary, master vs. slave).
The switches are usually on the back, near where the cable goes in. They are real switches, but that's the closest term I can come up with.
posted
heh...I do know my around a bit. Just never learned the underlying theory behind it all. But thanks. It's all set up and working fine now.
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