On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 11:55:54AM -0700, Deryk Barker wrote:
> Thus spake Bill Moseley (moseley@hank.org):
>
> > I can never remember. With two IDE drives and one IDE CD do you place both hard drives on
> > the same IDE interface as master and slave and the CD on the secondary as master, or do you
> > place the two IDE drives on separate interfaces and make CD slave on one of the interfaces?
> >
> > I think I remember that you separate the CD from the hard drives because the CD can slow
> > down the entire interface. But if that's true does the CD always degraded the interface or
> > only when the CD is being accessed.
>
> I recall reading somewhere that you should not mix CD and HD on one
> IDE chain because the CDs were only capable of 16-bit IO so the chain
> would have to run at the slower rate whichever device it was
> accessing.
>
> I can't speak to the truth or otherwise of this, which I read some
> time ago. hdparm tells me that I have both DMA and 32-bit IO enabled
> on my DVD-R...maybe things have changed (what? in the computer
> business?)
Both my (fairly new) CD-RW and my (fairly old) CD-ROM are using DMA
and 32-bit I/O. So is the IDE HD on the same cable as the CD-ROM. No
problems.
You sometimes find HDs that don't like sharing a cable with CDs, or
vice versa, but not very often with newer kit. ("don't like" = "won't
work at all" as opposed to "work, but slowly".)
Apart from this, the best method seems to be to put the two drives you
expect to use least at the same time on the same cable... is that
clear? I mean that you maximise the intersection between "using two
drives at the same time" and "using drives on different cables".
--
Pigeon
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