Installing IDE devices

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Eric1285

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 10, 2003
Messages
1,517
Okay, I have 4 IDE devides I need to install..

HDD
HDD
DVD-ROM
DVD-RW

My friend told me that if I put the two HDD's on seperate channels, I'll get a slight performance boost, since IDE cannot read and write at the same time...having them on different channels will allow simultaneous read/write hard drive access. This sounds good to me. However, my question is, if I have data on the secondary channel, and my DVD-RW drive there, what happens when I'm burning data from the HDD to the DVD-RW on the same channel? It cannot read data from the HDD and burn data to the DVD-RW at the same time, so will it impair performance? What's the optimal configuration for best overall performance? I know most OEMs put the HDD's on the same channel, but should I do that?
 
Im not sure if youd notice a performance boost, but having for example a hard drive and a burner on the same channel can cause issues. Most of the time it doesnt, but then again theres that "alignment of the stars" factors, which is, sometimes stuff just makes you scratch your head and say hmmmm
 
Originally posted by Wixard
Im not sure if youd notice a performance boost, but having for example a hard drive and a burner on the same channel can cause issues. Most of the time it doesnt, but then again theres that "alignment of the stars" factors, which is, sometimes stuff just makes you scratch your head and say hmmmm
Click to expand...
i sorta understood the first sentence, the second one stumped me
 
Thanks for the help...I went ahead and put the HDD's on the same channel. I'm going to be running IDE RAID eventually, so why not just save myself the trouble of having to adjust the drives in the future.
 
Originally posted by wayne
i sorta understood the first sentence, the second one stumped me
Click to expand...

What i was trying to say is that in many cases, reading and writing on the same ide channel wont cause any problems. And sometimes it will. :p Depends on a lot of factors, but ive seen it cause some issues while burning cds, and causing data corruption.
 
I thought that IDE channels only opperated as fast as the slowest drive on it, so putting both HDD's on the same channel should work better?
 
Having the drives on the same channel shouldn't be a problem. The onlt time you'll see a performance hit is when transferring large files between the drives. Having both optical drives on the same channel used to be a problem copying disks on the fly, but now with all the burners having "burn proof," there shouldn't be one.
 
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