IDE chain quick question

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xFuryofFivex

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 28, 2004
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my teacher wanted me to find some info, you know how there is 2 ide channels. Hypethetically we have 2 hard drives and 2 cdrw drives.

he was saying that its faster to stick 1 HDD and 1 CDRW in a chain because it would be faster...(mainly for copying off cds)

i asked him, wouldnt that make it slower, becuz the cdrw is considerable slower than a HDD... is he correct in saying the above statement
 
Depends on what you are doing. The hard drives would be faster that way. The slave on any given EIDE channel is slower than the master. Though it's not by an amount that you'd notice. The difference does show up in testing.

Since the Optical drives are slower, technically putting the hard drives as masters on seperate channels would theoretically be better. In the real world, it won't make a huge difference.
 
The speed of the device is sort of irrelevant the way you're talking about it :). It's more about the amount of data traveling on the IDE chain. Fastest would be to only have 1 drive per channel. I think your teacher is pointing out that 1 HDD and 1 CD-ROM per channel means that the HDD which sends data faster coupled with a CD-ROM sending it slower is less likely to have delays due to bandwidth than two higher speed devices (e.g. two HDD's) on the same chain.
 
we talked about it again. he was saying because there in the same chain means its a more direct route.
 
I wouldn't think route would have much to do with it because the data still has to go to the IDE controller to be told where to go.
 
i guess i misunderstood him...ill ask him to respond on his own so he can explain it better than i can :)
 
Usually having the CD on one channel and the HDD on the other would give the best performance.
 
Actually I had a CD-R drive a couple years ago that wouldn't do hard drive to CD-R burns unless it was on a separate channel. And I've even seen computers (software) that have given "recommendations" to change the CD-R drives to use separate channels for CD to CD Burning (ie. two drives).
 
I thought the transition to 80-pin IDE made it so that each device had equal bandwidth. Not the case?
 
Axman said:
I thought the transition to 80-pin IDE made it so that each device had equal bandwidth. Not the case?
Click to expand...

AFAIK, that is the case, but there's still the problem of bandwidth I believe. If you're trying to transfer files from a HDD and trying to read from a CD-ROM on the same chain you're going to run into slow downs.
 
There is no such thing as 80 pin IDE. It's 80 wire. 40 of those wires are used for grounding to achieve higher speeds.

Also, It's best with modern drives to put the cd drives on their own channels because most optical drives do not support the faster signaling needed for ata100, in fact, like scsi, and ide chain is forced to operate at it's lowest specification so and optical drive on the same channel with a hard drive will force the entire chain down to the maximum speed possible.

To sum it up, if your drive needs the 80 wire cable, putting an optical drive will slow you down because it does ground out correctly for the ata100/133 specs. If your drive does not need the 80 wire cable, it won't matter.

No matter what putting more than one device on an IDE chain is going to cause issues. IDE can only access one device at a time, so they will fight for attention of the controller.
 
defakto said:
There is no such thing as 80 pin IDE. It's 80 wire. 40 of those wires are used for grounding to achieve higher speeds.

Also, It's best with modern drives to put the cd drives on their own channels because most optical drives do not support the faster signaling needed for ata100, in fact, like scsi, and ide chain is forced to operate at it's lowest specification so and optical drive on the same channel with a cd drive will force the entire chain down to the maximum speed possible.

To sum it up, if your drive needs the 80 wire cable, putting an optical drive will slow you down because it does ground out correctly for the ata100/133 specs., if your drive does not need the 80 wire cable, it won't matter.

No matter what putting more than one device on an IDE chain is going to cause issues. IDE can only access one device at a time, so they will fight for attention of the controller.
Click to expand...

So in other words, his teacher was wrong :).
 
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