to pick your brain a little deep (if you don't mind?) as these things
interest me once they are an issue for my needs, why is that?
they are both ATA 133 at 7200 rpm's, although the 250GB HD does have
16MB cache compared to 8MB cache for the 20GB, but the 20 does have a
slightly faster documented avg. seek time of 8ms versus 9ms for the
newer 250. also, I have the spec sheets for the older drive and it also
documents 63 sectors/track, the same as the 250GB drive. the only
difference is the amount of heads, but that's understandable, and the
cache. even though its a older, smaller drive, it still seems to have
current IDE drive specs, comparably speaking???
------------------------
sorry, if it sounds like I'm answering my own questions now, I apologize
for you time as I'm not a Usenet newbie by any stretch of the
imagination so I guess I should have done some simple homework first,
then asked you to fill in some of the uncertainties. your feedback and
time is much appreciated! found this, which turned out to be a good
place to get a better feel for all this.
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/modesAcc32Bit.html
----------------------------
Surely you arent actually using them in PIO mode ?
no, at least I don't think so? thus the questions. whatever WinXp and HP
has set up. I do notice the BIOS still uses PIO mode references so that
is what has me still wondering in that direction. the BIOS setting list
the HD as auto with a setting of PIO mode4 and Ultra DMA-5. out of
curiosity, is has a 32 bit transfer rate disabled, would that be
something to tweak.
the optical drives are both ATAPI with PIO mode 2 and UDMA-2 and now
digging a little deeper - from the article I reference above - into DMA
modes with ATAPI, probably a good reason to keep them together on a
separate IDE channel.
----------------------------
"Hard Disk and ATAPI Device Channel Sharing: There are several reasons
why optical drives (or other ATAPI devices) should not be shared on the
same channel as a fast hard disk. ATAPI allows the use of the same
physical channels as IDE/ATA, but it is not the same protocol; ATAPI
uses a much more complicated command structure. Opticals are also
generally much slower devices than hard disks, so they can slow a hard
disk down when sharing a channel. Finally, some ATAPI devices cannot
deal with DMA bus mastering drivers, and will cause a problem if you try
to enable bus mastering for a hard disk on a channel they are using."
---------------------------------
btw, how do I know if the system is taking full advantage of drives
speed as I see really nothing in system settings to confirm the BIOS
settings as far as DMA options acknowledgment, like in the device
manager for any of the drives, HD or CD except for what is probably a
separate issue, 'enable write caching' for the HD, which it is?
I'd write the data to the 250G drive and ensure that there is enough
physical ram so that the swap file isnt being used. It that isnt
economically feasible, I'd put the swap file on the 20G drive and
have it on the secondary channel.
in summery, what you were suggesting is its not worth the trouble of
using the 20 GB drive and just use the newer 250 GB, 16 MB cache btw, to
do everything. I already have created a partition that I use just for
recording so that should help a little. but given the extra data, would
you tackle it differently now?
but, upon further review and more data for you to process, would it be
worth the 20 bucks for an adapter to take full advantage of this smaller
- and equally fast throughput, so it seems - drives and independence of
a separate channel, away from the ATAPI devises or slave master setup,
as I have been reading and find that an IDE channel can only access one
drive at a time on a single channel?
------------------------------
Master/Slave Channel Sharing: By its very nature, each IDE/ATA channel
can only deal with one request, to one device, at a time. You cannot
even begin a second request, even to a different drive, until the first
request is completed. This means that if you put two devices on the same
channel, they must share it. In practical terms, this means that any
time one device is in use, the other must remain silent. In contrast,
two disks on two different IDE/ATA channels can process requests
simultaneously on most motherboards. The bottom line is that the best
way to configure multiple devices is to make each of them a single drive
on its own channel, if this is possible. (This restriction is one major
disadvantage of IDE compared to SCSI). An add-in controller like the
Promise "Ultra" series is a cheap way of adding extra IDE/ATA channels
to a modern PC.
-----------------------
I wouldnt myself. I'd spend it on more physical ram if the swap file
is used during the actual wave recording.
I did just added a GIG of ram to the system for 1.5, the overall
capacity being 2 GB. as for the swap file, what would you suggest for a
swap file size. by default custom setting, which something did - initial
768, maximum 1536. I have loads of space, like 60 GB free on the system
primary partition.
again, thanks in advance!
