two CDRW drives, one ATAPI ch. or two?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Randy Vikssten
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R

Randy Vikssten

If one has two CDRW drives to install under
WinXP Pro, is there any real advantage in
putting the two optical drives on different
ATAPI channels for drive-to-drive copying?


*|RandyVikssten|*
 
The question still remains, though - should the CD writer
be put on a different ATAPI channel from the CD reader
if copying "on-the-fly" is to be done?

(In my current situation, I have an old CD/DVD-ROM drive
and a new CD+-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and I didn't want
to confuse the issue by involving different formats and media.
So just pretend it's a CD-ROM and a CD-RW.)


*|RandyVidssten|*
 
Yes. That' the way I went about it, only I used a pci ide controller card to
attach a new cd-rw because my second ide channel was already occupied with
my original cd-rw slaved to a zip drive.

HTH,
 
Our situations are really similar, as my CD/DVD-ROM
drive and my Zip drive currently use the secondary ATA
channel. The primary ATA channel on the mobo will be
freed up when I put the 2 new HDs on a PCI UltraATA
controller card, and I can put the new CD-RW on the
primary ATA channel that used to be for the single HD.
Guys in other NGs have said, though, that the time to
burn the data into the CD slows things down so that
contention for the channel doesn't affect throughput.
Has anybody experimented with configuring their
optical drives both ways, i.e. on the same channel and
then on different channels, and seen if their copy-on-
the-fly times differ?


*|RandyVikssten|*


"Curt" answered:
Yes. That' the way I went about it, only I used a
pci ide controller card to attach a new cd-rw
because my second ide channel was already
Click to expand...
.. occupied with my original cd-rw slaved to a zip drive.
 
I've not experimented with this myself but, it seems to me that the most
important thing is how fast data gets to the buffer and out again in either
setup. Having the HDs run through a card would slow data transfer down a
bit.....how much I can't say. Probably negligible.
In my present setup I use three burners. A 48x Iomega USB ,a 52x PlexWriter
and 10x HP 9300i that took the place of my regular cd-rom. Using either one,
I get rated burn speeds 95% of the time and that's fine for me. It may not
be for you.
You don't mention your system specs but, you probably already know how they
can affect burn speeds too. You'll just have to see what configuration works
best with your system.

Good luck,
 
Curt said:
You'll just have to see what configuration works
best with your system.
Click to expand...


If I ever get the time to experiment with copying
CDs with the drives on different channels versus the
same channel, I'll post. But holographic storage
media may be standard by that time. :-)


*|RandyVikssten|*
 
I don't have a DVD-burner so I may be wrong about this but, I would think
recording would still be available on it despite having a regular CD-rw on
the system. I have 3 burners on my system.1 usb and 2 ide. Burning is
available on all 3. The same should apply with a DVD burner and a CD-rw.
[/QUOTE]
 
-----Original Message-----
I don't have a DVD-burner so I may be wrong about this but, I would think
recording would still be available on it despite having a regular CD-rw on
the system. I have 3 burners on my system.1 usb and 2 ide. Burning is
available on all 3. The same should apply with a DVD burner and a CD-rw.
Click to expand...
I read the article you mentioned in your post. Do you
know what happens when you install a CD-RW drive and a
DVD-/+RW drive in the same system? The DVD-/+RW drive
can also burn CDs. I'd like to use the DVD drive mainly
for burning DVDs and the CD drive for burning CDs. But I
wonder if the second drive "enumerated" would be
disabled. If the second drive was the DVD burner, would
all burning be disabled or just the CD portion?
Click to expand...


.
Thanks Curt. Are you running Windows XP? Did you have[/QUOTE]
to do anything special like a registry edit to get both
of the IDE drives to burn CDs?
 
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