J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

I have been helping a mate replace the 2nd ide hard disk in his pc, after much aggro and Bios flashing it transpired that it had a 30 gig max and was his second standin pc (he is a musician) so I get it all working and he comes and collects it.

He rings up tonight worried about how the drives are configured, the 2 hard disks are on the primary channel and the cd and cdrw are on the secondary, he remembered being told that it should be one hard disk plus one cd on each channel, personally I think I have spent enough time on it and am glad to have it off the kitchen table and dont know why he is worrying as its a second pc, the rest of me wants to know more about it, the one website I found suggested buying another pci ide card to run the devices off and I cant be arsed.

Your suggestions please.

sc00by-d00by

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.

Like you say - an add-in PCI IDE card is a quick fix if you can be arsed.

Fuzz

Primary channel-
Master HDD (boot HDD)
Slave HDD (Music)

Secondary channel
Master CD-RW
Slave CD Rom

That's how I'd do it anyway

Not sure why you'd want a CD-RW and a CD rom though as CD-RW will do the same thing..

what would scooby do

I always try to put a burner on it's own channel without any other devices - also as Fuzz states - why have a CD and CD-RW when new burners can burn at 48 speed

sc00by-d00by

With a CD + CDRW you can do on-the-fly 'backing up' (cough) of a CD to another CD.

cong

hi

ok here goes

ide1 should have 1 hard drive (preferably the one with the smallest and fastest storage)+ 1 cd drive the operating sytem should be on this hard drive
ide2 should have 1 hard drive + 1 cdrw

Tony_W

I agree with cong.

With this arrangement you can cover most uses...Hard Drive to CDRW (separate IDE channels) and also do CD to CD as they are also on separate channels.

There doesn't seem to be much of a problem nowadays with setting up CDRW's on different channels as burn-proof technology on CDRWs copes with any problems such as latency in data, but it did make a difference a couple of years ago.

King RA

Like everyone says you have done it the 'not so right' way but it really doesn't matter. Tell your mate I said it is ok and stop moaning about it.

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

King RA, spot on, I dont care about his bleedin pc any more, it robbed me of about six hours, all I got was the 80 gig disk in place of the 30 in mine so I had to pull mine apart as well, I think he thinks I have stiffed him for 50 gigs of storage, didnt need it anyway!

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

But thanks for the info anyway guys !

Will do for next time