[sclug] Best drive arrangement?

[Alex Butcher]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, David Given wrote:

> 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.

I believe that modern controllers/drivers should be able to run the master
and slave at differing speeds. However, as with all things related to PC
hardware, YMMV. :-(

Something that could be critical, however, is that only one device per
channel can be accessed at any given time, so if you're ever planning on
copying directly from one optical device to the other (without an
intermediate copy on HDD), then they should be on different channels.
Conversely, if you always plan to write from HDD, it should be on a
different channel to your optical writer.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
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