which channel should drives be put on?

[Guest]

My computer currently has an IBM DJNA 22GXP 18GB 7200 RPM drive on the primary master channel on the motherboard, with a 10x DVD-ROM drive on the secondary master channel. However the hard drive has run out of space and I am going to buy a IBM 60GXP or 75 GXP drive of around 40gigs. What should I do with the channels? should the faster drive be put on a channel of its own? the motherboard is only ATA66 (an old Gigabyte Slot A Athlon board) and the existing drive is Ultra 66 also.

I'm not sure about the DVD drive but i've heard that one device on a channel at Ultra33 brings the whole channel down to that speed, would this happen with one slow, one fast Ultra66 drives. would the eide bus be fast enough to cope with both hard drives going flat out at the same time?

Any thoughts?

 

[Arrow]

Depends exactly what you want to do. If you will be doing hard drive to hard drive copying, it's probably better to separate the channels.

Rob
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[manish]

If you want your new drive for space - not for sheer speed, I suggest connect both hard drives to the same channel. Otherwise your DVD-Drive is going to make your second hard disk's speed look pthetic. You should also consider how much are you going to use the second drive - for example in case you only want to store all extra archived stuff onto it, so surely connect it with DVD-Drive, otherwise not.



Manish
http://manishmalik.cjb.net - just another 1-page site.

 

[dmcmahon]

Is it really true that the whole IDE train must run at the speed of the slowest device?!? Is that a Windows limitation or an IDE controller limitation?

 

[Guest]

I'm thinking second drive could be new root drive - as it will be faster, but i want both to be fast. if they are on the same channel on ATA66 then i guess transfering from one to the other would max out the bandwith, but just running windows, loading games or programs or data from one or the other... The slow drive could just be used for data, or stuff that didn't need to be fast, in that case should they both be on the same channel.

I don't really understand how the dvd drive will slow down
anything on its channel. would it just slow it down to udma33 or even further? udma33 would probably be ok if the old drive was on it, dvd is only 10x and hard drive is quite old.

Also, what about master/slave? is slave slower or is it just limited to the master's speed?

 

[manish]

Yes, that is an IDE controller limitation - as yet (the technology as of now...)



Manish
http://manishmalik.cjb.net - just another 1-page site.