Re: buying a cd writer

[Pigeon <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk>]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 11:10:30PM +0000, Jonathan Matthews wrote:
> 
> Is it the case (as a local PC shop assistant tried to convince me 
> recently) that having the reader and burner on the same IDE interface 
> means that copying CDs is faster?  As though the reader can put the data 
> on the wire and the burner read it directly, without it having to go
> reader -> ide bus -> cpu (or mainboard) -> ide bus -> writer.

That's the wrong way round. IDE is way too dumb to do that sort of
thing. The data goes reader -> ide bus -> cpu (or mainboard) -> ide bus ->
writer in any case. But with both reader and writer on the same port,
they can't both be transferring data at the same time. If you put them
on different ports, they can (more or less).

It's generally both faster and more stable to put the writer on a
cable on its own, and have the reader and the hard drive sharing the
other cable.

Pigeon