Cd-ROMS and Hard Drives

[dreamliner77]

I can't seem to get a straight answer on a couple of things:

Will having an optical drive (cd, cd-rw, dvd) on the same IDE cable slow down the performance of the hard drive (ATA 133)?

Also, I can only get the cd-rom and cd-rw to show up as PIO-4. They still seem to operate correctly though. I know others have been able to change them to DMA. HOW? I tried through device manager with no results (they are set to auto select DMA if available).

Another question I can't seem to get consensus on is if I should have both optical drives on one cable and the hard drives on the other cable. I do alot of disc to disc copying. Anyone have any good ideas?

BTW, I just decided to ditch my ATA133 card. Too many probs.

Any insight into this would help me tremendously. Trial and error is really starting to suck...

 

[Geffy]

Yes having a PIO device as a secondary to a UDMA device will slow the UDMA device to the speed of the PIO device.
PIO is CD ROMs and things like that, UDMA are hard drives.

CD ROMs on max speed transfer are PIO-4.
In XP I think that the DMA settings are managed by XP.

It is best to have both optical drives on the secondary controller if you are using the primary for your system Hard drive, I have onboard RAIDand ATA100, along with the standard IDE ports, so I have 4 ports to attach drives to so I have each drive as a master on its controller, the optical drives on the IDE ports and the hard drives on the ATA100/RAID controller.

 

[dreamliner77]

Here's what I'm gonna do:

Primary IDE:
Master = 60 gig quantum ata 100
Slave = 60 gig Maxtor ata 133

Seconday IDE:
Master = HP 12x CD-RW
Slave = Hitatchi DVD-ROM

See any probs? WHat I worry about its slow cd-cd copying. I guess I'll just have to try it and see what happens

 

[Qumahlin]

Originally posted by gtgarside
Yes having a PIO device as a secondary to a UDMA device will slow the UDMA device to the speed of the PIO device.
PIO is CD ROMs and things like that, UDMA are hard drives.

CD ROMs on max speed transfer are PIO-4.
In XP I think that the DMA settings are managed by XP.

It is best to have both optical drives on the secondary controller if you are using the primary for your system Hard drive, I have onboard RAIDand ATA100, along with the standard IDE ports, so I have 4 ports to attach drives to so I have each drive as a master on its controller, the optical drives on the IDE ports and the hard drives on the ATA100/RAID controller.

This is a misknown thing, It will only slow it down when BOTH are in use at the same time. in other words if you are copying a cd to a HD it will only copy as fast the the cd rom can transfer at PIO. But the harddrive will go full speed. That is why drive controllers can have Device 0 and device 1 configured in different modes..IE one in DMA, one in PIO

they WILL NOT slow down just cause the cdrom is on the chain...that is SCSI, NOT ide.

Just thought i'd clear that up, it's one of the things we had to learn to get our A+ cert 😉 ..and if you EVER want a challenge.. try to set up a server using on SCSI devices it S-U-C-k-S!!!

Only SCSI devices are affected by the slowest on the chain rule...not IDE

 

[dreamliner77]

Thanks for clearing that up for me and everyone else. There still seems to be alot of debate about this subject.