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This borders on being on-topic but because technical writers need their
computers to work correctly to write (most of the time), I'll throw in a
quick reply:
> 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!
I do not believe this is an accurate statement. Someone will undoubtedly
correct me if I'm wrong, but while two devices on the same IDE channel
cannot BOTH read/write simultaneously, the performance of the channel itself
is NOT dependent, as you say, on the slowest device on that channel.
The main reason you want to place a CD-RW on a separate IDE channel than a
hard drive or another CD-ROM drive is that when you're burning a disk, you
don't want to have to pause talking to the burner to grab more data. This
would happen if both the CD-RW and source drive were on the same channel.
The burner would burn data, but then would NEED data from a drive on the
same channel, which would hiccup the flow of data to the burner, resulting
in a coaster.
I can tell you that anecdotally, I run my ATA100 hard drive and my 48X
CD-ROM on the same channel and I can assure you I'm getting full ATA100
throughput on my hard drive.
What you said may have been true some years ago, but I don't THINK it is
anymore.
-Chris Grant
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