Re: IDE configuration

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

First, I apologize for the length of this post.
Unfortunately, I seem to be the kind of person who
can't simply tell you the time, I seem driven to tell
you how to make the watch!

When helping another list member attempt to
troubleshoot a machine, a list member gave this bit of
possibly mistaken information yesterday, which I'd
like to comment upon a bit:

"- is this IDE or SCSI? Your CDW drive may have to be
on the master connection, obviously your hard drive
goes on the other master, and you put the CDR on one
of the IDE slaves. Check the install doc for your
drive or look on the manufacturer's web site."

Unless something has changed dramatically in the IDE
specification within the last several years, you
should NEVER put a hard drive on the same IDE channel
as a CD of any description, unless you are satisfied
with hard drive performance typical in the 1980's!

Total IDE channel performance has been limited to the
speed of the slowest device on the channel...or, at
least, to the speed of the generation of technology of
that slowest device. Thus, if you have one of today's
rather fast hard drives, you may be choking it down to
a much slower performance by putting it on the same
channel as a CD drive.

Particularly if yours is an IDE66, IDE100, or IDE 133
device, you will be wasting much of the speed you are
paying for in the drive. (And, if the hard drive is
newer than the machine it's in, you might be sure your
machine supports the faster IDE standard the drive
also supports. It is often worthwhile to purchase a
separate IDE controller that supports one of these
faster standards if you want to get all the
performance from the drive if your motherboard doesn't
support it at full speed!). 

If you have four IDE devices, but only one is a hard
drive, you are much the best off by adding an
auxiliary IDE controller to your system so the hard
drive stays on its own channel!

You should be sure at least one of your CD drives can
be switched between master and slave, of course, and
that you are using an appropriate cable for your hard
drive (the faster ones take the newer cables with
double the number of leads). 

Speaking of your BIOS, you should have the hard drive
transfer method set to the fastest method the drive
will support...probably best if you don't understand
this remark to have someone who has more hardware
knowledge look over the whole setup for you and be
sure you're getting all the performance you're paying
for!

It simply doesn't matter whether a CD is set as
"master" or "slave" on their channel; with most modern
BIOS chips, you can also boot from a slave device--so
the hard drive won't matter on its channel, either, if
the BIOS settings are correct.

If any of y'all need any further information or
suggestions, feel free to let me know and I'll try to
help. Likewise, if you rearrange your system based
upon my suggestions and find you are getting better
performance, I'd appreciate hearing about that, too!

All the best,

David



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