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IDE master/slave speed question

LordBritish

LordBritish

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 28, 2001
Messages
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I intend to have two parralel IDE hard disks connected in a master/slave configuration.

The master HDD is considerably faster than than the slave (7200RPM master, 5400 RPM slave).

Will the slave HDD slow down the primary HDD ?

Or are they totally independent?
 
Having two disks on the same bus will slow you down. Having two disks trying to sync at different speeds (e.g. a cdrom and a hard drive) will slow you down a lot.

But there's no difference in speed with fast/fast versus fast/slow drives on master/slave. If you know what I mean. :eek:

 
unhappy_mage said:
Having two disks on the same bus will slow you down. Having two disks trying to sync at different speeds (e.g. a cdrom and a hard drive) will slow you down a lot.

But there's no difference in speed with fast/fast versus fast/slow drives on master/slave. If you know what I mean. :eek:

Click to expand...

Huh?

So you're saying that the speed of the faster master drive will not be affected by the slower slave driver?

Or are you saying it will be?

:confused:
 
Okay, let's see if I can be a little less unclear.

If you have two devices that want to sync at different speeds (for example a cdrom (at 66 MB/s) and a hard drive (at 133 MB/s)) they will both end up at the lower speed. So in that case one would be slowing the other down. But if you have two devices that sync at the same speed (two hard drives, or two CDROMs) they won't be slowed by the presence of the other, if you're only accessing one device at a time. If you're accessing both, the maximum aggregate bandwidth is the sync speed of the channel, and that could be a limiting factor.

Make more sense?

 
unhappy_mage said:
Okay, let's see if I can be a little less unclear.

If you have two devices that want to sync at different speeds (for example a cdrom (at 66 MB/s) and a hard drive (at 133 MB/s)) they will both end up at the lower speed. So in that case one would be slowing the other down. But if you have two devices that sync at the same speed (two hard drives, or two CDROMs) they won't be slowed by the presence of the other, if you're only accessing one device at a time. If you're accessing both, the maximum aggregate bandwidth is the sync speed of the channel, and that could be a limiting factor.

Make more sense?

Click to expand...

So basically your saying that my slower drive (slave) is limiting the maximum speed of my faster drive (master) ?

Wouldn't the two drives "sync" at different speed since one is a much newer 7200 RPM while the other one is a slow old 5400 RPM drive.
 
The two drives likely sync at 100 or 133 MB/s. This shouldn't hurt things too much. You can check what mode they're in under start->run->devmgmt.msc->(your IDE controller)->properties->advanced settings tab->Current Transfer Mode and look in this chart to see how many MB/s that is.

 
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