second optical drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter jinxy
  • Start date Start date
J

jinxy

Seasons Greetings. A quick couple of questions, A friend of mine would
like to add a second optical drive (dvd rom) to his tower. The drive
that is currently installed is a writer and is connected via a sata
cable. The drive he wants to add is an ide. Does he have to set the
ide drive to master or slave even though it is not sharing the ribbon
with anything else? Also will he have to add a audio cable to this
drive? and will we have to get into the bios and make sure the ide is
set to auto detect? Thanks in advance for your inputs.
-J
 
jinxy said:
Seasons Greetings. A quick couple of questions, A friend of mine would
like to add a second optical drive (dvd rom) to his tower. The drive
that is currently installed is a writer and is connected via a sata
cable. The drive he wants to add is an ide. Does he have to set the
ide drive to master or slave even though it is not sharing the ribbon
with anything else?
Click to expand...

If its on the end of the IDE cable, set it to master or cable select, if
it's on the middle connector (if there is one) set it to slave or cable
select.

Also will he have to add a audio cable to this
drive?
Click to expand...

No

and will we have to get into the bios and make sure the ide is
set to auto detect? Thanks in advance for your inputs.
-J
Click to expand...

The BIOS probably is on auto detect, but it won't hurt to check.
 
jinxy said:
Seasons Greetings. A quick couple of questions, A friend of mine would
like to add a second optical drive (dvd rom) to his tower. The drive
that is currently installed is a writer and is connected via a sata
cable. The drive he wants to add is an ide. Does he have to set the
ide drive to master or slave even though it is not sharing the ribbon
with anything else? Also will he have to add a audio cable to this
drive? and will we have to get into the bios and make sure the ide is
set to auto detect? Thanks in advance for your inputs.
-J
Click to expand...

He does need to jumper the ide drive. If it's the only drive on the cable
then jumper it master. If the cable has two connections on it use the end
connector. If the OS is after Win 98 then he will not need to add an audio
cable. Audio will be channeled through the 40 pin ribbon cable. In the bios
setting the channel to 'auto detect' should be sufficent.

If the system is older, and the drive does not get detected by windows on
the lone cable as a master then try setting it as a slave. There were issues
sometime on older systems that sometimes on a system an optical drive could
only be detected as a slave rather than a master. This was sporadic, but
better warned than being frustrated.
 
Seasons Greetings. A quick couple of questions, A friend of mine would
like to add a second optical drive (dvd rom) to his tower. The drive
that is currently installed is a writer and is connected via a sata
cable. The drive he wants to add is an ide. Does he have to set the
ide drive to master or slave even though it is not sharing the ribbon
with anything else? Also will he have to add a audio cable to this
drive? and will we have to get into the bios and make sure the ide is
set to auto detect? Thanks in advance for your inputs.
-J
Click to expand...

IDE drives have jumpers.... you either set them to what you "want" or
elect to use the default setting. Better know what that is beforehand
tho, so in effect, you set the jumpers. Typical settings would be for
Master or Slave or CS for Cable Select. If you use the end connector
on an 80 conductor IDE cable, then Cable Select is a good choice.

An audio cable is probably not needed (I have several IDE Optical
drives on various computers and none of them use an audio cable.)
whether or not he needs to change something in the BIOS depends on
his system and whether he has the Optical Drives set up for booting.
 
jinxy said:
Seasons Greetings. A quick couple of questions, A friend of mine would
like to add a second optical drive (dvd rom) to his tower. The drive
that is currently installed is a writer and is connected via a sata
cable. The drive he wants to add is an ide. Does he have to set the
ide drive to master or slave even though it is not sharing the ribbon
with anything else? Also will he have to add a audio cable to this
drive? and will we have to get into the bios and make sure the ide is
set to auto detect? Thanks in advance for your inputs.
-J
Click to expand...

Some IDE suggestions.

1) 80 wire cables support cable select (CS). 80 wire cables have
better signal transmission characteristics than 40 wire cables.
40 wire cables are fast enough for optical drives, but 80 wire
cables are just better. Some computers use a 40 wire cable to the
optical drive(s), and an 80 wire cable to the HDD bays.

2) Fill the cable from the end position first.

3) There are several options for jumpering. If one option doesn't
work, try another. Western Digital hard drives adds "Master Only"
and "Master with Slave", just to irritate people, and mess up
any diagrams you might draw.

4) IDE is supposed to accept a mixture of operating speeds
on the cable, without one device "dragging down" the other.
Naturally, the slow device may spend a period of time on the
cable, which eats into the time available to the other drive.
But the signal rate of each should be independent. One drive
can run UDMA2, the other UDMA5, and it is all supposed to work.

Mobo --------------X--------X
|
Master, "Master Only", Cable Select (CS)

Mobo --------------X--------X
| |
Slave Master ("Master with Slave")
Master Slave
CS CS

5) Visit the BIOS and see that no interfaces are disabled.
The "Auto" option is best, simply because no one can remember
what the other options are for :-)

HTH,
Paul
 
Back
Top