Will this combination slow the bus to the lowest ATA33 speed when
accessing the ATA100 drive?
Yes.As the relationship between 1 and 2 devices changes as the 2nd
device is added they both become,"Child" Devices.Child Devices cannot
multi-task e.g read and write at the same time so,"Wait-States" are
caused.
Also if you think about it if you copy a file from an ATA 100 device
to an ATA33 device the data can only be read by the slower device at
it's Max which is of course ATA33 and if you copy data from the ATA33
to the ATA 100 then the ATA33 can only give the data at it's Max e.g
ATA33 speed.However if the two devices are copying from each other the
data transfers can be even slower than the lowest devices maximum
because of these,"Wait-States".
This is why I place my Standard Cdrom drive as a slave to my System
drive and my CDR/W drive as a slave to my 2nd hard drive.
If I want speed a never copy anything from my Standard Cdrom drive to
my System drive or from my CDR/W drive to my 2nd hard drive.
Note:
If two devices of differing speed are on the same IDE chain and either
is not being accessed then it is to all intents a purposes invisible
to the other and does not affect performance.
What is the current thinking for placing a DVD or CD writer drive in a
system. I always put it on an alternate IDE bus. Is this still
correct?
TIA, Rich
Best to copy data between each other from devices that are on separate
IDE ports.some newer mother boards have 4 IDE ports which allows much
more flexibility and of course you can use PCI Add-on cards to do this
as well.Most people who do serious large file manipulation use these.
HTH
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