two hard drives installation

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve James
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Steve James

Hi

Please could somebody advise me on the best way to install two hard drives ?

My O/S in W98s/e

I have 1x 20Gb ATA 66 5400rpm +1x20Gb ATA 100 7200rpm, at the moment both
are connected on the same (ata100) cable in to the same IDE port. I just
wondered if this was the best way and if the port will only run at the
slowest speed (ATA66)

MTIA
Steve
 
Steve James said:
Hi

Please could somebody advise me on the best way to install two hard drives ?

My O/S in W98s/e

I have 1x 20Gb ATA 66 5400rpm +1x20Gb ATA 100 7200rpm, at the moment both
are connected on the same (ata100) cable in to the same IDE port. I just
wondered if this was the best way and if the port will only run at the
slowest speed (ATA66)

MTIA
Steve
Click to expand...
Steve, if you have an 7200 100 drive connected to the same IDE interface as
sthe 5400 66, then the slower drive will slow down the faster. To get best
performance seperate the drives, the 7200 on IDE 1 and the 5400 on IDE 2.
and you can put your CD on the latter.

Eddie
 
Hi Eddie - Well Lee, doesn't support his view with an explanation so I think
I will try your advise- Its appreciated thank you

Steve
 
What do you want me to explain other than that hasn't been the case on
motherboards for about 5 years now. You believe these other guys so easily,
why not me? It's an old wives tale, so to speak. And also generally
considered "common" knowledge to that effect. I was hoping some of these
other guys would chime in to back me up. They usually do.

There's no benchmark out there, no timed transfer test, sandra, anything
that proves this slow down theory. I have a cd burner as secondary master
and a hd as sec. slave, the controller says the HD is UDMA 5 and the CD is
UDMA 2. The nice part is you can set up the drives any way you want, some
like to copy disc to disc and don't want both CD-ROMS on the same channel,
but it doesn't slow down your hard drives.

Not to mention this has all been discussed a hundred times and with
basically the same points/counter-points. Try www.google.com next time.

And while I'm on a roll, if you follow these guys advice and put "the 7200
on IDE 1 and the 5400 on IDE 2.
and you can put your CD on the latter" then you'll be slowing down the
ATA-66 drive to ATA-33 speed! Explain that one!!!

HTH....
 
Lee

Sorry I hope I didn't offend you, I know nothing of your knowledge so took a
brief comment at face value. Your last paragraph is most interesting though-
because what (I think) you are saying is that a cd drive sharing an IDE port
with a hd will have to share the available speed i.e. ATA-33 each OK. So why
would it be that two hard drives sharing an IDE port NOT cause a slow down
?. I am not disputing your knowledge but I fail to see how the two scenarios
are different

Cheers for taking the time
Steve
 
Steve James said:
Lee

Sorry I hope I didn't offend you, I know nothing of your knowledge so took a
brief comment at face value. Your last paragraph is most interesting though-
because what (I think) you are saying is that a cd drive sharing an IDE port
with a hd will have to share the available speed i.e. ATA-33 each OK. So why
would it be that two hard drives sharing an IDE port NOT cause a slow down
?. I am not disputing your knowledge but I fail to see how the two scenarios
are different
Click to expand...

He's saying that following the logic of a 66 HD slowing a 100 HD to 66, the
33 CD should slow the 66 HD to 33. Therefor, you'd have a 100 HD and a 33
HD, whereas if the HD's were on the same channel, you'd have two 66 HD's.

But, he's saying that the slowdowns won't happen with modern systems.
 
No problem. Here's a pretty good explanation of the timing issue.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_Timing.htm
More info http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confPerformance-c.html but
even this guide is a couple years old now and may contain some not so
current info. Like the part about HD and Optical drives, again these days
it just doesn't matter. That actually goes against *my* personal preference
which was to have Primary Master and Slave be a HD and DVD-ROM---Sec. Mas.
and Slave CD-RW and HD. That way I can copy discs "on the fly", transfer
between HD's, backup's, etc. and when I need to load a program I have a CD
drive on a seperate CHANNEL because of what Ed Smiley alluded to, which is
true. Each channel is like a one-lane highway with a traffic cop. Only one
device can be in use at any one time. But again, with all the buffers and
other implementations to protect data in transit. You guessed
it......<SPOILER>!

it just doesn't make a difference.

Ok, it's Friday, the beer lights on ...Lee
 
If you are using one of the drives to record audio or video onto, then put
it on an IDE channel all to itself. This is a popular reason for having two
drives. In this application I think the drives could be accessed (near)
simultaneously too.

Come to think of it, if you do this it will help if you want to play back
music from one drive whilst running apps from the other too.

Matt
 
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