[TriLUG] IDE Drive/Channel Config

[Joseph Tate]

You will most likely want the drives as masters on separate channels, 
but it depends on your usage.  The basic rules for IDE are these:

You can only access one device on each channel at any given time.  If 
you are accessing both devices simultaneously (i.e. reading from one to 
write to the other) you will see significant performance issues.
There's no significant penalty for being the slave device so long as 
both devices aren't being accessed simultaneously. (no numbers to 
support this, but that's my understanding)

I'm not sure if the master actually does any work when the slave device 
is in use.  If that's the case it supports my feeling on using hard 
drives as the masters since they generally support stuff like UDMA 4 and 
ATA133, etc.

So, if you frequently burn from hda to hdb, you'd be better off moving 
hdb to hdd.

You can figure out from there which would be your best set up.

Joseph

Ken Wahl wrote:

>Hey all,
> 
>I'm trying to figure out how to best configure my hard disks and optical
>drives.  I currently have 2 hard disks and a CD-ROM set up like so:
>
>Primary Master: WD Caviar 40 gig =3D WinXP =3D hda
>Primary Slave: Maxtor 40 gig =3D Red Hat 8 =3D hdb
>Secondary Stand-Alone: ATAPI 40x CD-ROM =3D hdc
>
>Now inject into the mix:
>
>Sony 16X DVD-ROM (to replace CD-ROM)
>Plextor PlexWriter CD-RW
>
>What's the best configuration as far as what to put on what channel so
>that everything will work in both OS's with the least amount of slowdown
>to the hard disks?  If possible, I would like to be able to burn
>straight from the DVD drive but if I can't then so be it.  If it helps
>to answer the question, I do not do a lot of reading/writing from one
>hard disk to the other.
>
>I've searched this topic on the web but am getting conflicting answers.
>
>Any advice or URL's where I may read further would be appreciated.
>
>Oh yeah, I know somebody will say to get an IDE-RAID card.
>That's next on my purchase list.  But for now I need to work with what I
>have.
>
>TIA
>
>  
>