Plextor 16/10/40 and ATA/100

[novice]

I just got the retail package of the Plextor 16/10/40 today. I wonder if I have to use the ATA/100 cable or the ribbon cable comes with the package (40pin IDE)? Which one is better? Could someone explain this for me? Thanks a lot!

 

[Fa1c0n]

If your motherboard supports ATA-100 you might as well use that cable. Either one will work though. (ATA-100 is the fastest and best type of cable/standard).

P.S. Be sure to have your CD-ROM and CR-RW on different IDE channels. On your motherboard there are 2 (usually, although sometimes more than 2) IDE connectors. A good configuration would be to have your Hard drive and CD-ROM as "Master" and "Slave" on IDE channel 1 (respectively), and your Plextor CD-RW drive as "Master" on IDE channel 2 -like the directions that came with your Plextor show. If you don't do this, you will have problems with your copies being slow, and perhaps getting buffer under-runs, because IDE channels can only read <i>or</i> write, but not both at the same time. Having them on different channels fixes this problem.

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[Fa1c0n]

One more little note: If you can use ATA-66 or ATA-100 devices on your motherboard, then definitely use your ATA-100 cable. The Plextor 16/10/40 can take advantage of the faster cable, and so could any device that you use as a slave on the cable that your Plextor is attached to (if that device is a ATA-66 or ATA-100 device).

In other words, you can't go wrong with the ATA-100 cable. There is no reason whatsoever not to use it.

But if you use the old ATA-33 cable -although it will work- you will be cheating yourself of the speed you invested in.


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[camieabz]

But won't your ATA 33 devices slow down your ATA 100 devices if they are on the same channel?

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"Now drop your weapons or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly baby."
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[FrankW]

>>>>>But won't your ATA 33 devices slow down your ATA 100 devices if they are on the same channel?<<<<<

Sure will, unless you have the New Promise Ultra100 (or FastTrak) TX2. It'll allow you to put slower and faster devices on the same channel and they'll run at their respective speeds.

 

[mrtj]

i am interested in the problem you said about reading and writing at the same time. when i got my tdk writer, i installed it as master and my dvd-rom as slave. i noticed that i couldnt watch a dvd while writing (one cut the other off). the weird thing, is that now i can do both. i can watch a dvd or rip a dvd to a hard disk, while burning at 16x. this works after installing winoncd3.8 or whatever the green button version is. could it be anything to do with the softscsi crap it installs?

 

[Arbee]

The one device per channel at the same time is an hardware limitation of the ATA standard - there is no way of trully bypassing it.

But if there is a large caching to memory it might have the same effect - because the IDE channel isn't really saturated by the data rate, just the access (a single speed DVD has a under 1MBps transfer rate and a 16x burning is about 2.4 MBps - if there is some smart buffering to memory being done it could appear that the devices are accessing simultaneously). Of this would be possible because the HDD is way faster than the recorder (and the software does the buffering). So it could be the "whatever crap" it installs 😉

 

[Arbee]

Unless you are placing the CDRW in the same channel of a HDD, use the cable provided. Using an ATA100 cable would bring no improvement to the CDRW reading or writing speed.
Assuming you have one HDD and one CD (or DVD), I would advise to put the HDD alone in IDE1 (ATA100 cable), the CDRW as IDE2 Master and CD/DVD as IDE2 slave (in this you could use the ATA33 cable). Unless, of course, you spend all your life making CD to CD "backups".

 

[mrtj]

my current ide set up is:
primary: 12 gig hd + 30 gig
secondary: cdwriter + dvd-rom
ata100 pri: 80 gig maxtor hd
ata100 sec: 30 gig ibm hdd

i tried putting the cd writer on my ata100 but it either didnt show up, or windows didnt boot - weird. so i dumped my 30 gig ata66 drive on there. it runs slow on ata100 ide port, but it's only for storage. i don't plan to rearrange things since i can use both at the same time (even if it only fools me into thinking that it does, it still works)

i will be buying another maxtor 80gig sooner or later, should i dump that on the same cable as the other, or put it on it's own port (the same as the slow 30 gig)? maybe i will have to move that then.

thank god for 4 ide ports i'll never be able to go back to 2 now.

 

[Guest]

Guys, I see you know a lot of cables, well I have ATA/100 hard drive connected to ATA/100 IDE port, but HD came with 80pin ata/66 cable, do I loose performace with ata/100 HD using ata/669it's 80pin for sure) cable? Should I go and buy ata/100 cable?

 

[Spdy_Gonzales]

the ata/66 and ata/100 is the same cable. 80 wires, 40 pins

I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.

 

[Arbee]

Well, if your primary IDE is your boot and windows disk I would start by "upgrading" it. Always use the fastest drive for the most used role. Newer drives are usually faster than older ones (with same rotational speed).

But if you aren't willing to spend the time it takes to reinstall the system (or if the ATA100 is your boot and windows disk)- and addressing your question, I would put it with the other 80gig. Not only both drives are ATA-100 as if you use the 30 gig for storage (actually all drives are for storage 😉) you'll probably be moving more files between the new drive and the 30 gig than between the maxtors - hence the advantage of not being on the same channel.