2 harddisks setup both as master?

[Ignace]

I have two harddisks, one for programs/sample library and the other for audio data. Just like everyone else I guess. They are master and slave on the same IDE bus.

Would there be a performance gain if I installed them each on their own IDE bus as master and setup my DvD burner and CD burner as slaves? Or is the bus speed not a bottleneck? Front bus speed is 533 MHz.

The IDE cable is probably to short to setup as above: would it hurt to buy a longer (hi-quality) cable? An alternative could be to buy another external USB 2 drive.

I do use a lot of harddisk streaming on the first drive, so both drives are very busy most of the time.

If you have any experience with this, or you know what you are talking about I would very much like to hear from you!!

Best wishes,

Iggy

[Whoomph]

I would really like to know about this too as my 2 hard drives are setup like you say both as masters with my cd and dvd as slaves , I have no idea if this is good or a bottleneck thing or what ?
I haven't notice any change as I've never had it set up the other way .

I need to spend more time working out stuff like this but I also NEEED to make music which there is never enough time in the day for .

[TechnoWeeniePas]

From what I gather from my knowlage I think that if you are accessing both drives at the same time that you will get a very slight increase if you have them on different channels. But that applies to any drive...so if you are say burning you will want the burner on a different channel than the drive your burning from...make sence? You kinda have to figure out what has the highest priority to you and put thoso drives as masters...then put the other drives as slaves on the channel ooposite from the drive that will also be accessing at the same time on master.

So if you say had the following setup:
Chan1 Master = OS Drive
Chan1 Slave = Burner
Chan2 Master = Samples drive
Chan2 Slave = DVD

Your priority would be thus:
1)OS / Samples
2)Burner / DVD
2)OS / DVD
2)Burner / Samples
3)OS / Burner
3)Samples / DVD

[Whoomph]

Thanks , thats certainly made it clearer ,

[whyterabbyt]

I wouldnt necessarily expect you'd get a speed increase, but you do want to avoid having two drives on the same bus when you need a consistent throughput on one or other of them.

The way you have it means that throughput is more likely to be shared, which isn't probably as good for audio, so I would split it up so it was one hard drive and one optical per cable, since you're much less likely to want to play back multiple tracks of audio from your host while reading or writing a CD or DVD.

Incidentally d'you need both a CD-RW and DVD-RW? You could slave your DVD-RW to your boot drive, and put your audio drive on a cable of its own just to be sure.

Alternately, hard drive controller cards can be had amazingly cheaply, so you could even get one and put eveything as master on a bus of its own that way...

[Whoomph]

Incidentally d'you need both a CD-RW and DVD-RW? You could slave your DVD-RW to your boot drive, and put your audio drive on a cable of its own just to be sure.

This me thinks me will do, Ta .

[Ignace]

Alternately, hard drive controller cards can be had amazingly cheaply, so you could even get one and put eveything as master on a bus of its own that way...

I think you just solved my problem..Any disadvantages to these hard drive controller cards? Sounds almost too good to be true.

Thanks Whyterabbyt!

[DevonB]

Alternately, hard drive controller cards can be had amazingly cheaply, so you could even get one and put eveything as master on a bus of its own that way...

I think you just solved my problem..Any disadvantages to these hard drive controller cards? Sounds almost too good to be true.

Thanks Whyterabbyt!

Yes, one significant disadvantage; another device hogging the PCI bandwidth, and streaming audio won't be kind to it. I believe most new motherboards should have the imbedded EIDE controller on the south bridge (talking Intel chipset here, haven't looked into VIA, SiS, nVIDIA, etc. but doubt it be that much different.) The south bridge has more bandwidth, in the case of the ICH5 chip, it has 266MB/sec for example. The PCI bus can only handle 133MB/sec.

If you can, stay away from putting cards on the PCI bus. The more you can push data away from it, the better off you are for many reasons, which I won't go into gruesome detail. Your sound card is going to need enough freedom as is.

Devon

[Ignace]

Hi Devon,

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

HD controller card is out then, and longer IDE cables are also a bad idea I believe. So, if I can't just swap drives around I'm going to leave everything as is, I think.

Anyway, everyone thanks for your input!

Best wishes,

Iggy

[Lunch Money]

I have my 2 HDD on one channel and my 2 optical on the other. The idea was to use both optical drives... eg. duplicating CDs or listening to music on one of them.

Since I don't duplicate CDs very often at all (no real need to), and I don't even REMEMBER the last time I used an optical drive as a CD player, I think it'll be time to slave the DVD to the primary master and put the audio drive on its own channel.

That's some good and sensible advice.

Greg

[DevonB]

Hi Devon,

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

HD controller card is out then, and longer IDE cables are also a bad idea I believe. So, if I can't just swap drives around I'm going to leave everything as is, I think.

Anyway, everyone thanks for your input!

Best wishes,

Iggy

Ah yes, the spec calls for no longer than 18". You can find 24" and 36" cables. I'd have to pull out my cables to even see for my ATA100 drives how long they are. I believe at least one of them is 24" long though and works fine.

Devon