Hard Drive Setup

[Chasbo]

I have 2 identical hard drives (IBM 14GB 7200rpm Deskstars). Is there any performance difference in putting the 2 drives on the same IDE channel (master/slave) as opposed to having them on seperate channels by themselves?

Chuck

[onbelay]

If the 2 drives are the same speed, there should no problems or peformance issues placing them on the same channel (ie master/slave)

[Echo|Fox]

Absolutely positively!
If at all possible, you should _always_ seperate your harddrives onto multiple chains. Of course, its not always possible, but with my BE6, i have my two hard drives each on a seperate ATA66 chain, and my burner and dvd-rom each on a seperate ata33 chain. This is a NOTICABLE difference from when I had my BH6 and I had my two HD's on the same chain.
If you can spare the IRQ's, an addon ATA33 or ATA66 board is well worth it.

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P3-450@558mhz@2.1v, ABit BE6, 128megs 7.3125ns PC133 SDRAM, SB Live! Value, G400 32meg Dualhead (@120%), Acer ALN-201 PCI 10bT NIC, 6.5gig Seagate Medalist Pro 7200rpm, 13gig Quantum Fireball CR, Yamaha 4416e Burner, Pioneer 10x DVD-ROM, Panasonic e70 17" Monitor, Antec KS-188 24" Tower, 6 year old Honeywell-SUH 101key Keyboard, Logitech Trackman Marble+

[RAB]

Based on my recent experience, I would think putting both drives on the same cable, with the one in the center of the cable set as Slave, would work best. But trial and error is good, too. Go here and get a trial copy of HD Tach and run the read tests and see which way works best.
HD Tach 2.6 Demo

RAB

P.S. What the hell is a "MURCette"? I've been called a lot of things, but never a MURCette.

[This message has been edited by RAB (edited 11 November 1999).]

[This message has been edited by RAB (edited 11 November 1999).]

[Brian R.]

I agree with Echo/Fox - I have never seen a reliable opinion recommending any two IDE drives of any kind be placed on the same channel. If it is necessary, place a slower drive, such as a CD-ROM on the slave with HD as master and separate the two HDs on two different channels. The reason given is IDE cannot make transfers to more than one drive per channel simultaneously. This is one major advantage SCSI has over IDE.

[Jorden]

I have my 10.8Gb 5400 rpm (master)drive and 9.1Gb 7200 rpm (slave)drive on one IDE cable without a problem.

If I'd swap my 9.1 to the other IDE port my troubles start, for then either my CD-ROM or LS-120 don't work nomore, or irratic.

So it might be a trial and error based setup for your machine as well. Having set my Windows swapfile to the 7200 rpm drive did at least speed up my overall Windows 98.

Jorden.

[Guyver]

Jorden,

Some or all problems with HD's and other ATAPI devices come from varying levels of ATAPI compliancy.

Chasbo,

There are some HD's (older of course) that could not be paired together on the same channel, or only with one particular drive as master. If the drives were reversed they didn't work.

Experience is the best instructor. Try it each way, benchmark it, then test in the real world by using your daily programs, games, applications. Sometimes a system optimized for benchmarks will lower performance in real world apps. (ie hardware optimized for sequential access, slows down even more when doing non-sequential access - case in point - HD Block Access, great for sequential, but bad for random reads.)...

If performance is your goal, and money isn't a concern, go SCSI.

Guyv

[This message has been edited by Guyver (edited 11 November 1999).]