General question on installing two hard drives

[machete]

Hi,

Glad to be part of this forum!

I have two 7200 rpm, ATA100 drives and a DVD drive. I perform a lot of video editing and processing between the two drives so there is a lot of transfer of large amounts of data between them.

I'm not sure whether both drives should be on the same cable as primary master and slave or on separate cables. If separate cables, should the DVD or the second drive be set to secondary master?

I was told I would get better transfer rates with the drives on separate cables since read/write operations could be made to both simultaneously. However, I was also told that a DVD drive and a hard drive on the same cable would degrade the performance of the drive.

Can somone offer suggestions to how I should configue these three drives given the type of work i will be using them for? Thanks

 

[zon]

machete-

Basic stuff, I know, good for clarifying though...
There are two IDE channels on a motherboard, primary and secondary. Each channel is capable of supporting two devices, master and slave.

So we have:

Primary master
Primary slave

Secondary master
Secondary slave

You always place your bootable drive on primary master, and you will want to put your second hard drive on secondary master. In this way transfers will be quick between the drives like you had thought. As to where to put the DVD, it depends as to whether you will be ripping any DVDs or such. If so, put the DVD on the opposite cable as to where you presume you would like the destination files be.

ie
If copying files from DVD to hard drive on secondary channel, place DVD on primary slave. Opposite channel of destination files. If you won't be doing any kind of extracting, go ahead and put DVD on secondary slave. It should be best there.

Your welcome

To the future
Zon

 

[paparazi]

And this is where the debate starts! because whichever channel you place the DVD drive on, the hard drive on that channel will be slowed down to the DVD drives slower ATA33 rate?? or will it? Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[wolluf]

This question seems to recur quite frequently - has anybody actually tried testing these setups to see which (if any) is faster? When motherboards starting having 2 IDE connectors, I was told it was good idea to put CD Rom on second as it was slower than hard drive and would slow down hard drive to its speed (didn't seem to be as many multi-hard drive systems then). I accepted this advice - but never actually checked it out. Now fair few people have at least 2 fast hard drives, so...

 

[oilbase]

I want to add a second HD and being as my mother board is full due to the master HD, cd rom, floppy and cd burner I added another controller card. Things worked fine for awhile and then I started to experience slow downs and non boots. I called the people at Dell and after some time they told me that my motherboard wouldn't or couldn't handle a HD in excess of 17 gig. But if I have a separate controller card for the new HD in my mind it should work. Not to give Dell a bad name but after more than 8 people trying to help me the last one came up with the motherboard situation and even told me that their company didn't sell any computers that supported 80 gig, but check some adds and you will see they are selling computers with 120 gig. I want to try and install the second HD again. Any suggestions on how to do it properly?