can I use my CD-drive IDE cable to connect my harddrive to mobo, too? HELP Please!

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dubbyah

Limp Gawd
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Sep 12, 2005
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Well, I'm assembling an old via computer with a 2700+ chip. I have a 40gb IDE harddrive I want to connect. Right now, the CD Drive is connected to the mobo with an IDE cable. This same IDE cable also has another female connector on it that would fit into my harddrive's IDE port.

My question is whether I can just hook the drive right into this IDE connector already on the cable that's connecting the CD drive to the mobo, or if I need to get a second individual IDE cable and then connect the drive to the second IDE port on my mobo. It would be much easier if I could just use this one IDE cable to connect both to the same mobo port.

Thanks a lot for the clarification!
 
you can connect 2 drives via the same ide cable. make sure you have your drives set to one as master & the other as slave. i normally use my hd as master & optical as slave, but thats me. another thing to realize is the drives will be sharing the bandwidth, but depending on what u are using the syst for, may not be a big deal.
 
how much of a bandwidth hit would i notice if i hooked the cd drive (which i probably wouldn't be using much at all) and the harddrive (which would be my one and only hd) up using the same cable?? the computer will be for audio work, recording/mixing/arranging
 
I highly doubt you'll be able to even tell, a cd rom drive isn't going to use up that much bandwidth, if you're worried about it get another cable they cost about a dollar.
 
oplin said:
I highly doubt you'll be able to even tell, a cd rom drive isn't going to use up that much bandwidth, if you're worried about it get another cable they cost about a dollar.
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Bandwidth getting used up isn't the issue. Putting a CD-ROM drive on a chain guarantees that it only runs at 66 MB/s, so buying another cable will help a good deal.
 
If you hook both drives to the same IDE cable, it's not a "bandwidth" issue, it's simply that you can't access both devices at the same time. You can't read from the CD/DVD while writing to the hard drive, etc, all at the same time. Data will be read from the CD/DVD or written to it in chunks as data is read from or written to the hard drive on the same cable.

Data transfers from one to the other typically perform at a 50% speed hit since only one operation at a time is possible.

Most people will never notice the difference in the long run, so adding the hard drive to the second connector isn't going to totally obliterate your system's performance even though the implication is there. It's just not that bad.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
If you hook both drives to the same IDE cable, it's not a "bandwidth" issue, it's simply that you can't access both devices at the same time. You can't read from the CD/DVD while writing to the hard drive, etc, all at the same time. Data will be read from the CD/DVD or written to it in chunks as data is read from or written to the hard drive on the same cable.
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Unless it's sequential transfers, which is kind of likely to happen with audio. There really is a 66 or even 33 MB/s limit (depending on your optical device), which makes a difference when your drive transfers faster than that.
 
Bumping an old thread.

I'm replacing a Mobo that had two IDE ports with one that only has one. For IDE, this system was actually really fast, IMHO.

Do I need to put the HDD on the end connector and the CD drive on the middle, or is that only important for cable select? Obviously I can jumper the HDD as master and it's location in the case means that it will be easier to connect it to the middle connector on the cable.

Should I seriously consider buying a SATA CD Drive to prevent the current one from "robbing" performance from the HDD?
 
I guess Wikipedia has put my mind at ease.

Two devices on one cable — speed impact
There are many debates about how much a slow device can impact the performance of a faster device on the same cable. There is an effect, but the debate is confused by the blurring of two quite different causes, called here "Lowest speed" and "One operation at a time".

[edit] "Lowest speed"
It is a common misconception that, if two devices of different speed capabilities are on the same cable, both devices' data transfers will be constrained to the speed of the slower device.

For all modern ATA host adapters this is not true, as modern ATA host adapters support independent device timing. This allows each device on the cable to transfer data at its own best speed. Even with older adapters without independent timing, this effect only applies to the data transfer phase of a read or write operation. This is usually the shortest part of a complete read or write operation. [17]

[edit] "One operation at a time"
This is caused by the omission of both overlapped and queued feature sets from most parallel ATA products. Only one device on a cable can perform a read or write operation at one time, therefore a fast device on the same cable as a slow device under heavy use will find it has to wait for the slow device to complete its task first.

However, most modern devices will report write operations as complete once the data is stored in its onboard cache memory, before the data is written to the (slow) magnetic storage. This allows commands to be sent to the other device on the cable, reducing the impact of the "one operation at a time" limit.

The impact of this on a system's performance depends on the application. For example, when copying data from an optical drive to a hard drive (such as during software installation), this effect probably doesn't matter: Such jobs are necessarily limited by the speed of the optical drive no matter where it is. But if the hard drive in question is also expected to provide good throughput for other tasks at the same time, it probably should not be on the same cable as the optical drive.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDE_Cable
 
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