IDE arrangement!

leeroybrown

I want to connect a CDROM(x24), CDRW(16x10x40), HDD and Zip Drive to my two IDE Connectors.

If I remember correctly the two CD's cannot be on the same Connector.

The HD will obviously have to be Primary on one of the IDE's.

So I am thinking:

Primary 1: HD
Secondary 1: CDROM
Primary 2: CDRW
Secondary 2: Zip
(Or maybe swap the two CD ROMs)

Is this the best performing arrangement or is there another way to squeeze a bit more out?

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"I'd rather have a bottle infront of me than a frontal lobotamy"

Xterminator

Using your arrangement above, the hdd will be limitd to the speed of the slower device on the IDE channel.

I would probably put the newer cd rom device on this channel as a slave.

The best thing to do would be to add a Eide controller card, and have this for the hdd.

Theres a state of the art pci one in peats for IR£39.95 inc. VAT. This is an ATA100 controller, cables inc. they also advertised a ISA one for £23. (slower) (www.peats.ie)

Gerry

It depends on whether you do mainly copying from cd to cd or compiling cd's from the hard drive. Since you don't have a dvd rom, I'd say you have a pretty good arrangement there. If it doesn't work satisifactorily, try swapping the 2 cd drives.

WhiteWashMan

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Gerry:
It depends on whether you do mainly copying from cd to cd or compiling cd's from the hard drive. Since you don't have a dvd rom, I'd say you have a pretty good arrangement there. If it doesn't work satisifactorily, try swapping the 2 cd drives. </font>

yeah, id swap the 2 cd rom about and have your main cd rom as your master on second ide cable. om not aware however of any issues of putting 2 cd roms on the same ide cable, if there is, can someone enlightne me?
oh, and ide controllers are groovey. have a promise 66, only costs about 25 quid. very useful if you want to add another 4 ide devices, if you can get them in and figure out all the cableing
just cant seem to get enough cables in there!

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your Dungeon Is Full Of Yoghurt.....

Gerry

Xterminator, the hard drive will not be limited to the speed of the cdrom. You are getting mixed up here. Say the cdrom was using most of the available bandwidth of the channel, lets say 100 megs a second, then the hard drive would slow down. Otherwise there is no problem. There is also an issue where if the cdrom was stuck, trying to read a dirty disk, this might stop the hard drive from transferring data. But if the cdrom is trying to read a dirty disk, this normally hangs the machine anyway, even if the cdrom is on its own cable.

wwman, on newer boards at least, a hard drive and a cd rom seem to co-exist much better than 2 cdroms. Especially if you are doing direct copying.

leeroybrown

thanks for the advice!

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"I'd rather have a bottle infront of me than a frontal lobotamy"