philgr

Ok help me out here guys or gals if you can,

I have two machines at home and currently have them networked together, i did this really to see if i could set them up and mess around with networking etc..., i thought i would use the other machine to store my backups, music collection etc...
But i have become bored with it and intend to retire the other machine to the loft and use it as a spare. but before i do that i intend to remove the 30gig and leave a 20 gig HD in the machine, i want to put this 30gig HD in my new machine and use it, now here i need some advice on the best way to config the drives on my machine, here is what i have

1 x 80Gig HD udma100
1 x 30Gig HD udma66 (one from other machine)
1 x CDRW Mode 2 (what ever that is?)
1 x DVD Mode 2 (as above)

Now my motherboard has 2 IDE ports and i understand that the IDE port will run at the lowest drive speed !,
Currently my HD is the master in IDE 1 and the CDRW is the master on IDE 2 with the DVD as the slave, i do not want to put the new drive on the IDE 1 as a slave as it is UDMA 66,

Suggestions please, i will consider buying expansion cards if that is what is requied,

Phil G

fast bloke

Depends on what you do most. If you spend a lot of time burning CD's from images on one hard disk, the speed up of having them on different channels will be more significant than the slow down of the 100 running at 66. If you do a lot of disk to disk transfer then keep them on different channels. An expansion card would give the ultimeate performance, but you would be hard pushed to see the difference.

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

The mode 2 most likely means that the drives are both at DMA mode 2, which is UDMA33.
Otherwise, it would be PIOmode2, which is ancient, only capable of something like 8mb/s transfer rate and doesn't use Direct Memory Access to transfer data, which loads the CPU up. 99.99% positive that they are both UDMA33, as virtually all DVD drives use DMA and a lot of recent CDRW's use it too now.

For the best performance setup, having 4 channels and having 1 device as a master on each controller is best, but as Fast Bloke says, not by great leaps and bounds, but better, none the less.Both CDRW's and DVD drives as a rule of thumb prefer ideally being masters of their channels.

E.G
Iwill SideRAID100 IDE controller card
(2 IDE channels with ATA100 support, no longer support CD-based devices) flashed up to version 2.31 BIOS

80Gb ATA100 Primary Master on the Highpoint card
20Gb ATA66 Secondary Master on the Highpoint Card
DVD Primary Master on the standard IDE controller
CDRW Secondary Master on the standard IDE controller

Will all go as fast as they can

The Iwill card also comes with 2 80pin cables too

Cheers,

Nick




[Edited by Mr Footlong - 4/17/2002 5:19:15 PM]