IDE drive on DVD channel

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dBTelos

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2006
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Would their be a problem if on the second IDE chain that has one DVD drive, if I stuck a IDE drive in there on slave. Just for storage? The first chain has two IDE drive. I have an extra IDE drive and was wondering if I could add it on.
 
There is no DVD channel. You have two IDE connectors that can run two IDE devices, for a total of four. It does not matter what they are or how thay are connected. You can run four CD drives, or four HDD's or any combination of any IDE drive you want. No problem at all tossing a HDD on after the DVD. Just make sure you set the master/slave jumpers.
 
My understanding about the IDE ports is that is generally not a good idea to have a dvd-rom and a hard drive on the same cable. The reason for that is the dvd-rom does not have as fast of access times as hard drives do, so by put the hard drive on the cable that has a dvd-rom means the hard drive will be a bit slower now as well. I believe dvd-rom's operate on a PIO mode while hard drives working on a completely different mode. :D

But then again, I could be wrong. :confused:
 
You're pretty close, it's not an access time issue. What's going on is *most* not all optical drives are purely ata33, they are not wired for ata100/133 as most harddrives are. The IDE controller detects if the entire channel, all drives and the cable, are able to transfer at a specific speed. It then operates the channel at the lowest common speed, so with an optical and a harddrive usually, ata33.

Optical drives now a days are DMA, so PIO isn't an issue. Most burners start acting funny if they get kicked into PIO mode, think buffer underruns alot.
 
Well I don't plan on using the drive for anything special. Not even trasfering files often. My DVD drive is a TDK DVDRW that I have had for a couple years. I assume everything will be fine. right?
 
defakto said:
You're pretty close, it's not an access time issue. What's going on is *most* not all optical drives are purely ata33, they are not wired for ata100/133 as most harddrives are. The IDE controller detects if the entire channel, all drives and the cable, are able to transfer at a specific speed. It then operates the channel at the lowest common speed, so with an optical and a harddrive usually, ata33.
Click to expand...

This used to be true some years ago but on modern motherboards and OS it is not an issue. The HDD will still run at it's fastest capable speed even with a DVD drive slaved to it. Persoanlly, I put HDD's on one IDE port and Optical drives on the other. Simpler to hook up that way if you have two of each, as I do.
 
Have seen instances where using an optical drive as master and hdd as slave created problems, but hdd master / optical slave worked fine. Probably depends on controller & drives.
 
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