Which is the best way to connect my 4 IDE items?

  • Thread starter Thread starter JSW
  • Start date Start date
Bruce Gaylinn said:
Two different issues are being confused.

1: IDE transfer mode. On older systems an IDE channel ran at the mode
supported by the slowest device. This is no longer true for boards
made in recent years.
Click to expand...

Bruce, thanks for trying to clear things up, and your reply was
probably informative to Turner, Groove, and I, but I want to point out
that Groove and I were not confusing your two issues. While Turner
asked about the master+slave issue, Groove ignored that issue in his
reply and he and I were only talking about whether the IDE transfer
mode issue (which we didn't name) was 100% solved by modern IDE
controller hardware or did it also require modern (driver) software to
take advantage of the better hardware. I'll note that I'm sure that
software is involved in the setting of IDE modes, eg, during an OS
boot.

You've repeated Groove's original claim that the issue goes away with
modern hardware, but you've given me no more reason to believe you
than Groove did. He was good enough to admit later that it might
still be an issue with some software. (I was wondering about older
MSFT and UNIXy OSes.)

So please answer my question explicitly; Does modern hardware make the
issue go away regardless of driver software (eg, Win95, Linux 0.9, and
PC DOS 3.1)? How do you know?

Thanks.
 
Gary W. Swearingen said this...
You've repeated Groove's original claim that the issue goes away with
modern hardware, but you've given me no more reason to believe you
than Groove did. He was good enough to admit later that it might
still be an issue with some software. (I was wondering about older
MSFT and UNIXy OSes.)
Click to expand...

This is getting very interesting. It's way beyond my level of expertise to
know whether this is a hardware or software issue. All I know is what I see
on Windows OS's. I shall be very interested to see what more expert minds
may contribute.
 
So please answer my question explicitly; Does modern hardware make the
issue go away regardless of driver software (eg, Win95, Linux 0.9, and
PC DOS 3.1)? How do you know?
Click to expand...


Dos is moot has there is no enhanced data transfer software (E.g. DMA)
Linux I don't think it has any either(never seen that discussed)

The problem was collisions from within the Bus would cause data corruption when trying to send/receive from the same IDE channel to
and from devices on that channel (noticed considerably in the early years of burning CD's ,buffer underruns).
Now has far as answering explicitly, we would use google. u should too.
 
Well! The troll has landed to throw his $.02 in.

I have 2 hard drives and 3 optical devices working here. The hard drives are
on a Promise card with each as a master on those 2 channels. Now for the
opticals. I elcted to configure the dvd reader as a master on ide1. A cdrw
resides with it on ide1 as the slave. A dvd burner is attached to ide2 as a
master. I personally have found no issues one way or the other as to where
the burners are located as far as the master/slave issue is concered. My
burns work as well as anyone elses as far as I know.

This setup seems to work pretty well for efficiency in my opinion. I can
load/install a new program or driver from the dvd reader and it will in
most cases write it's information to the boot hard drive which is a master
on the Promise card, so no delays there.

One may ask: Why the redundancy of the burners? Being anal and cheap I am
working on a personal theory that if I let my dvd burner burn only dvd
disks, then the lifespan of my burner will be longer. The same goes for
burning cd's in my faithful Liteon cd/rw. I would much rather buy a dvd
reader than a burner right now with prices what they are.

If I choose to read a very large amount of data off a dvd, the dedicated
reader will, in most cases, do it much faster than the dvd burner could.

I also installed a bay fan right in between the two burners. This I also
believe will help extend the life of my goods by keeping the temps down a
little. Most of us know that when burning anything, there is more heat given
off than under normal idle conditions. Those lasers put out some therms....

Oh yeah. I never do a cd to cd copy/burn.

Here's my main system configuration:

Abit NF7s v2.0 Mainboard
1 x AMD 2500xp+ (333 fsb) Barton (unlocked) CPU
1 x ASUS TI-4200 128mb 8x agp card
2 x 256mb Crucial memory modules (dual channel @400)
1 x 512mb Crucial memory module (dual channel @400)
1 x Sony floppy drive
1 x Liteon/JLS 166s Dvdr
1 x Liteon 40125s cd/w
1 x Liteon LDW 411s cd/dvd/ + - rw
2 x Western Digital WD800JB SE 8mb cache hard drives
Win XP Pro

This same system ran like crap with Win98SE. Now it runs pretty good.

Regards, Bob "hopelessly insane machine warrior" Troll
 
JAD said:
Dos is moot has there is no enhanced data transfer software (E.g. DMA)
Linux I don't think it has any either(never seen that discussed)
Click to expand...

When you've never seen something discussed, you should do yourself and
others a favor by not making statements about it. Linux (and the BSD
OSes) have used DMA for many years. I can believe your statement
about DOS and DMA, but I wonder if PIO modes still effect the issue.
The problem was collisions from within the Bus would cause data corruption when trying to send/receive from the same IDE channel to
and from devices on that channel (noticed considerably in the early years of burning CD's ,buffer underruns).
Now has far as answering explicitly, we would use google. u should too.
Click to expand...

You should assume that people will use Google when the want to use it.
It's a real bore to read that as often as it's used. Either reply
with something useful or move on without adding to the already
considerable noise. You should also format your messages in a less
ugly and hard-to-read manner.
 
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