[sclug] Best drive arrangement?

[David Given]

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Neil Haughton wrote:
[...]
> I've been told that a better arrangement is to have the two HDDs as
> master/slave on one channel, and the two optical drives as master/slave
> on the other. The logic of this escapes me, but I'm not a hardware
> person and things are not always what they seem at face value.

This could well be wrong, but...

HDDs usually support a faster IDE mode than optical drives, and if I
recall correctly, the fastest IDE mode on a single channel is
constrained by the slowest device on the channel. So by putting an
optical drive on each channel, you're restricting the speed of the hard
drives.

What I'd suggest is trying some benchmarks. 'hdparm -t -T /dev/hd?' will
 measure the transfer speed of a drive. (It'll give you two numbers, one
the speed the drive's hardware can push data over the cable, and the
other the speed it can read data off the disk.) If you try this in
various combinations, you should be able to figure out the best combination.

- --
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