Me Again

[SyPh0n]

Righty.

I have an Abit KX7 333-R motherboard and a WD 80GB hard drive. I also have a CD-RW and a DVD ROM drive installed.

This motherboard has RAID onboard, IDE3 and 4. Would it be possible to put the hard drive onto IDE 3 or 4, and then put either optical drive on IDE 1 and 2 on their own. The main reason I ask is for performance increase. Will it make my hard drive a bit quicker on it's own cable rather than share it?

If it does, but not that much and it's a hassle then I'm not bothered. But, if it's a case of enabling the RAID controller, swapping cables and booting up I might as well (if it'll be quicker).

Cheers

[Luckeh!!!!]

no difference, each device will run at the fastest speed possible.

Data transfer between two devices will default to the speed of the slowest device.

[SyPh0n]

Thats what I mean though. My optical drives are slower than the hard drive, but running the two optical drives together, on my system anyway, causes all sorts of hassle during burning, playing DVD's etc.

At the mo my hdd is paired with the DVD drive, I just thought perhaps moving the hdd onto the 3/4 IDE channels would benefit it.

Stuff it, I'm just in a mood over my PC because I keep building PC's for people which are so much nicer

[Luckeh!!!!]

Originally Posted by SyPh0n

Thats what I mean though. My optical drives are slower than the hard drive, but running the two optical drives together, on my system anyway, causes all sorts of hassle during burning, playing DVD's etc.

At the mo my hdd is paired with the DVD drive, I just thought perhaps moving the hdd onto the 3/4 IDE channels would benefit it.

Stuff it, I'm just in a mood over my PC because I keep building PC's for people which are so much nicer

don't burn on-the-fly

if you do, then you still got problems, if you burn on-the-fly then the two devices involved should be on the same IDE channel.

for me, I have 4 IDE devices, two HDDs on IDE 0 and 2 optical drives on IDE 1

I can burn a CD with data from my HDD (not on-the-fly) and still watch a DVD, infact burning a CD only takes up 5% of my CPU resources according to Task Manager.

[meglamaniac]

I don't know if you were considering it, but 2 optical drives on the same channel is a no-no. The lag between a request for something from the drive and it actually happening can be a second or more with any optical drive, and this causes all sorts of problems when using both at once. Trying to copy a CD on the fly with both optical drives on the same channel would take many times longer than if they were seperate.

As a general rule, I avoid on the fly copies if at all possible simply because there's more to go wrong. It does also tend to tie up more system resources. I use CloneCD which will copy a disc to a tempoary image on the harddrive, then burn it back onto a blank one. Used with 2 drives (so you don't have to stop to change the disc) this can still copy a full 700mb CD in about 10 minutes on my 24x burner, a perfectly acceptable time so far as I'm concerned.

As for speeds (god I keep seeming to say this a lot) modern ATA controllers can accept different speed devices on the same channel while still maintaining each devices rated speed.
However, it will always be faster to have each drive on a dedicated channel if you've got the space and resources, since there is then no sharing of cables (and therefore data transfer time) at all.

[SyPh0n]

I dont have any problems burning from cd-to-cd or from the hard drive. My writer is 16x , manages to burn a cd from hdd in about 6 (depends) and about 1 minute or so extra cd-to-cd. I'm going to keep it as it is now. I would have to have another cable in my case, and I don't have many places left to stuff it! :eek:

[SyPh0n]

Originally Posted by meglamaniac

I don't know if you were considering it, but 2 optical drives on the same channel is a no-no. The lag between a request for something from the drive and it actually happening can be a second or more with any optical drive, and this causes all sorts of problems when using both at once. Trying to copy a CD on the fly with both optical drives on the same channel would take many times longer than if they were seperate.


As for speeds (god I keep seeming to say this a lot) modern ATA controllers can accept different speed devices on the same channel while still maintaining each devices rated speed.
However, it will always be faster to have each drive on a dedicated channel if you've got the space and resources, since there is then no sharing of cables (and therefore data transfer time) at all.

I've experienced the 2 optical drive problem playing around when I initially built my PC up, trying to keep my HDD on it's own channel. It's why now I've come back to the "I want my hard drive on it's own" argument (with myself). As it stands, it's lurking with my DVD drive (I think I said it was with the writer earlier), and my writer sits happy as larry in IDE 2.

As for on-the-fly, I really don't have many problems with this particular writer. The only coasters I get are from BSODs and when the image I burn from hdd, or the cd I'm copying, is knackered.

So, which kinda nullifies my previous post, it would be worth sticking my drive in IDE 3?