Daisy Chain IDE Drives

[TheDailyIntelligence]

Hey,
I was doing some research on daisy chaining stuff and saw alot of people talking about daisy chaining IDE drives without PCI/Raid cards or any extra stuff. Is this actually possible and if so how?

 

[COLGeek]

You can connect 2 IDE devices to a single cable. You must also configure the jumpers on the connected devices (HDD or optical drive) to both be Cable Select (CS) --OR-- one to Master and the other to Slave.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

 

[Paperdoc]

I don't think there is a way to daisy chain IDE drives. What COLGeek said is right. He draws attention to the original design of the IDE interface system. Although you certainly CAN connect UP TO 2 devices to one IDE port on a mobo, that is not daisy-chaining. The system was designed to handle two devices on each port, and it works only if each device has a different ID (that is, Master or Slave of that port) set by jumpers on pins on each drive unit.

"Daisy Chaining" normally means that all the devices on a communications line share that communication medium, and there must be a way to manage that. Actually, many network systems, including the common Ethernet one we all use, were designed to be used this way. It includes a protocol called CSMA/CD for Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection, and it packages fixed-size bundles of data into "packets" that carry identifiers and error-detection bytes as well as the original data. However, it has become very common not to use Ethernet networks in daisy-chain configurations at the level of individual users; instead we commonly use routers and switches to do most of the routing jobs, and configure our networks to have only one computer on the end of each cable from a routing device. This is much easier to troubleshoot, and more efficient in handling traffic. What we don't usually think about is that, beyond the nearest switch or router, the rest of the network IS using this protocol, with hundreds and thousands and ... of data sources sharing the network for movement of data packets.

 

[COLGeek]

I didn't mention earlier (as it was outside what was originally asked), but "back in the day" you could "daisy chain" multiple SCSI devices on a common cable. A similar (but different) ribbon cable, as used by IDE devices), was used.

This could be useful for general learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI