Re: IDE array question

On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 07:03:21 +0000, The Seabat wrote:

This has probably been debated forever, but maybe some one can give me a
difinitive answer. Ha!

I have two 40GB hard drives, one DVD burner and one CD/RW burner. What
is the best way to arrainge these puppies on the two IDE channels for
optimum performance? I don't plan on ever doing any disc-to-disc
copying, so that is not a concern. Right now I have the boot drive and
the DVD burner on the Primary channel and the other hard drive and the
CD/RW burner on the Secondary channel. Both the CD and DVD drives are
set as slaves and the hard drives set as masters.

Someone said that it is better to have both hard drives on the Primary
and the two burners on the Secondary. Is this better than the way I have
it?

Running Windows 98, Athlon XP 1800+, 256MB RAM Thank you.

I had a wierd experience regarding this recently. A 2.4GHz Pentium 4 PC
using an Asus P4PE motherboard. I had a Pioneer 109 DVD burner sitting by
itself on one IDE cable, and my two hard drives sharing another IDE cable.
With this combination, I noticed that even though I set my DVD burner to
burn at 8x speed, the total burning time was equivalent to 2x. I also
noticed that the LED on the DVD burner flashed slowly on and off, and I
thought this was normal to mean that the DVD was in operation. (I found
out later that, no, if the DVD was being constantly supplied with new data
and not being starved, then the LED would be on constantly during the
write operation. So apparently I was not getting data fast enough to the
DVD burner here). I also had many DVD write failures when burning from
images located on the "slave" hard drive.

My hard drive started to become quite noisy, and anticipating a pending
failure, I replaced it with a new IDE hard drive, same basic type but only
larger (80GB instead of 40GB). While doing so I re-installed Windows 2000.
Since I had more hard disk space, I only installed the one hard drive. Now
the boot hard drive is on one IDE cable, the DVD burner on the other.

And now when I burn a DVD at 8x, it really does it in the time it should
take for 8x writing, and the DVD LED is on all the time.

So for my system, for some wierd reason, having two hard drives on one IDE
cable and with my optical storage (DVD burner) on the other did not work
out well at all! The only other possible explanation is that my old
Windows operating system was at fault, after so many years of operation.

Anyone have an idea why this happened, regarding the extremely slow data
transfer rate?

- Steve, Denmark
.

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