IDE setup for best performance

[dleigh]

I have a computer with 2 hard drives and a CD-ROM and a CD-RW/DVD drive. My desire is to create a setup that allows I/O to go the fastest without a lot of conflicts.

To that end, I've set up the drives as follows:

Primary controller:
Master: 40GB hard drive (Operating System and all software)
Slave: 40x CD-ROM drive

Secondary controller:
Master: 6.4GB hard drive (swap file and nothing else currently)
Slave: CD-RW/DVD drive

When I boot up, it looks like all the drives except the CD-RW/DVD drive are at the same UDMA level and the CD-RW/DVD drive says something else (don't remember right now).

Unfortunately this has not created any sort of I/O Nirvana as I had hoped by separating the swapfile drive from the rest of the world. Often the drives will work like mad and the CPU spike. Two examples are spooling a large graphic, and writing to the CD-RW drive.

My system has 256MB ram, Pentium III 600Mhz. The motherboard is an ASUS CUC2000.

My suspicion is that the CD-RW/DVD drive is slowing down that IDE bus and that I should put the two hard drives together or put the swap file drive with the CD-ROM drive instead.

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, probing questions?

Thanks!
David

 

[wolluf]

If you look through old posts, you'll see a long running debate about whether HD/HD & CD(DVD)/CR-RW or HD/CD(DEV) & HD/CD-RW is best setup - with no firm conclusions that I've seen! So, my suggestion is 'experiment' & see what works best for you.

 

[cdogg]

The different combinations have their own advantages. HD/HD and CDRW/CDROM is often preferred so that you don't slow your entire system down. If one or both CDROM drives aren't compatible with ATA/100 (UDMA 5), then you risk slowing down the hard drive that's on the same IDE channel (assuming that it can use ATA/100).

The only time you want to use the HD/CDROM and HD/CDRW setup is when copying from CDROM directly to CDRW and you want to sustain the highest transfer rate possible. Having them on separate IDE Channels can significantly boost performance. But, you risk sacrificing optimum HD performance, so you could end up slowing the entire system.

Best Solution: Invest $30 into a PCI ATA/100 IDE Controller card. This will effectively give you 2 more IDE channels (1 for each device).
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