On Sat, 2005-10-15 at 20:45 +0100, Bob Dove wrote:
It seems that using a magnetic and optical drive on same IDE connector slows things down somewhat. This is of course Windoze lore, but assume motherboard/IDE et al works same in 'IX.
Yes sadly this is something we can't blame Windows for. The IDE bus has to run at the clock of the slowest interface on it, otherwise the slower device wouldn't be able to talk. The different connectors relate to different IDE channels so they are not affected by each other.
So putting your slow drives on one channel and your fast drives on another makes a lot of sense with one caveat. If you have two drives in your system and expect to be doing a lot of data transfer between them or a lot of simultaneous data transfer. Then you really need the drives on different channels as the IDE spec cannot access Master and Slave at the same time.
On some modern SATA mainboards (ones with dual disk controllers like the MSI 8KT Neo) It is possible to set yourself up as I have done with DVD drive on Master 1 DVD Recorder on Master 2 and Hard drive on SATA 1 of the 2nd controller. On cheaper SATA boards the SATA channels share the PATA channels so using SATA 1 disables Master 1.
Oh and I think someone was asking about the difference between ATA-33/66 and ATA 100/133 cables (often described as 40 and 80 conductor cables).
The difference is pretty easy to spot, the older 40 conductor cables have larger ribs in the ribbon (more like the cable that goes to the floppy, if you still have one) The 80 conductor cables are much finer. Many BIOS'es will spit out an error if there is a 40 conductor cable on IDE1, although a lot of modern Optical drives are ATA-100 capable so I tend to not use 40 conductor cables at all now. There is no problem using 80 conductor where you could have used 40.
The 80 conductor cables are also a lot more delicate, so if you are having funny disk problems reject any cable that shows signs of distress (even if it is just heavy creases) I have had machines come into the workshop before with what seems to be random disk corruption or strange errors whilst installing, changing the IDE cables in a couple of cases has cleared the fault.