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I'm installing A DVD burner and I have currently got a CD-rom already installed. Is It wise to put the burner on a seperate IDE channel to the hard drive where IDE 1 will have the hard drive and CD-ROM connected to the same channel or is better to have the burner on the same IDE channel as the hard drive. An explanation why which would be better would be a great help....thanks
Put the DVD on it's own channel on IDE 1 and leave the hard drive on IDE 0. Make sure the hard drive stays connected to the mobo in the same place it started from... It will give you a slight increase in burning speed with the DVD as the master of the second channel. You might want to plug the cd rom drive in as slave on the DVD cable.
Hi,
In a standard configuration you would have your first channel (IDE0) supporting your HDDs and your second channel (IDE1) supporting DVD,CD,ZIP etc.
You get better performance that way and the system will be more stable.
On your IDE1 cable have the DVD as master and the CD or whatever as slave.
I do not believe in mixing devices on the same cable, as strange things can happen. They should be of the SAME type (fixed media v. removeable media)
Cheers
I almost agree. The thing to watch out for is the transfer modes. Put all UDMA/133 drives together, UDMA/100 together or PIO mode 4 together etc. It doesn't matter if the drive is a removable or not. Just don't mix different transfer modes on the same cable/controller. That's how you get the 'optimal' configuration.
How is there a slight increase of speed if the Burner is on IDE1 rather than IDE0?
Re-read the reply from the others..Quote:
How is there a slight increase of speed if the Burner is on IDE1 rather than IDE0?
You can put your HDD on IDE1 if you want to.. ..the speed isn't realy to do with which IDE you put the DVD onto..it is to do with the devices that are on the same channel..
IF you have the Burner (or any optical drive for that matter) on the same cahnnel as a HDD the channels data speed is slowed to the slowest device.. usualy the Optical device.. And as it is good practice to place the Boot drive on IDE0.. that is why ..
Also some MoBo's are funny as to where you place your Boot HDD.. the crap cheap ones are the main offenders
Cheers
Just a small point:
On the MoBo's I've been looking at recently, it's marked as IDE 1 and IDE 2 ..........
Other than that I set my system up as stated here.
IDE 1 [0] for the HDD
IDE 2 [1] for the CD re-writer
One last thing:
I have a 'full' sized tower, and when I changed the MoBo, the position of the IDE slots was in a different orientation to the original. And as such, I've had to lower the position of the CD re-writer as the existing IDE cable would no longer reach ........
Question: is it possible to buy IDE cables longer than those sent as standard ?
I only need a few inches more [please don't say it] so it's not a life or death issue, just something I would like to know.
Normaly no to the longer cables with IDE.. It is a specification limitation in the standard. AFIK
cheers
Ah well; I'll just have to make do with what I've got. [Still don't say it]
Might have to buy a smaller tower case NEXT time ...........
You can't have more than 18 inches if it has no slave, no more than 22 if it has slave and master.
The reason you can probably see better performance when you have the HDD and DVD-Burner on different IDE channels is because of how IDE works. Basically, when you have just one HDD on the IDE cable, it gets to use all of the bandwidth. When you have two HDD's, they have to share the bandwidth.
In reality, there are enormous electrical issues that adding another drive complicates. Especially since PATA and your IDE HDD were originally meant to transfer things at like 3MB/s back in the day when it was created. Today, they are trying (not very successfully) to squeeze 133MB/s out of it, although getting to 66MB/s was a big enough challenge in itself. This is where SATA comes in to fix all of the problems of this ancient, pushed to the limits, PATA standard...
In SATA, ach drive gets its own dedicated cable. No more worrying about how another HDD will impact impedence and how any combination of HDDs will affect signal bounce/reflection. Less clock-skew issues. Less interference. Better performance. Also, less space is taken up, since SATA only has 4 wires...
Anyways, if at all possible, especially when using multiple HDDs, put only one drive on a cable, and nothing else. Just get a single cable for this. But in your case, just seperate the HDD from the CD-ROM/DVD drives. That will make it easier since they won't fight for time on the cable (since they are on different ones) to talk to the IDE controller (which would have to send the data back up the cable to the DVD Burner if they are on the same cable, preventing the HDD from sending more data at that time) when you are burning a DVD at high speeds. Otherwise, group the PIO together and UDMA together. The cable has to go to the lowest speed of the thing connected to it, with PIO being the worse (IIRC) especially for a HDD.