I have two HDDs; Primary - Seagate Barracuda 80GB (used for Windows and programs) Slave - Seagate Barracuda 400GB (music only) At the moment they are connected to the motherboard using one IDE cable with three connectors on it. I was wondering if I would get better performance if I connected the HDDs to the motherboard with seperate IDE cables? I recently got rid of my floppy drive so I have a spare connector on the motherboard which I could use for the slave HDD, and connect the primary to the usual connector. Will this work? If it will, will it give me better system performance?
Hmm, well, you can't use the floppy drive controller as an IDE controller, because they are different. The cables are also different (floppy one has a twist in it, if you look at it carefully, where the IDE ones do not). Not sure if that is what you meant by the 'spare connector' or if you actually were refering to an extra IDE controller on the motherboard? As far as performance goes, technically, having each drive on seperate controller would allow both drives to be accessed by the system at the same time, where as on one single controller, only one drive can use the channel at at a time. This doesn't really matter much for your configuration though, because having only music on the second drive, it doesn't take much hard drive use to play music, as the song is loaded into memory before it's played anyway, unlike a CD, where it's read off the drive on the fly.
You would have to sacrifice your cd rom drives to have two hard disk drives on two ide leads. Like Parachutes said, you wont benfit much from doing this is its just music on that drive. I take it you mean mp3s n stuff.
As far as I know, in your case, you should have one of the HDD's with the CD/DVD-ROM on the same channel. And the other HDD on its own on the second chanel. It is my undestanding that you will get best performnance this way. However, you can, indeed use a PCI expension card to give you a third IDE channel and have each drive on its own channel. I doubdt you will see a big boost doing this. You are probably better to just do as mentioned above. For firmawre upgrades and plain good housekeeping, have the CD/DVD-ROM at the begining of the ribbon as Master and the HDD next as slave. Good luck.
the reason there are 3 connectors per IDE cable is: 1 for your first IDE device 1 for your 2nd IDE device and 1 to connect to your mobo or I /O card Parachutes is correct about the FDD it is easly identifyable by the twist of 5 cores (11 - 15 i think) i've always put HDD's as primary master and another HDD as primary slave, RW drive as secondary master and standard ROM drive as secondary slave basically i keep HDD's and ROM drives on separate IDE channels
Yeah, same here. A while back, when I was getting weird freezing at BIOS errors with my IDE devices, I read up on the 'proper' (should I say recommended) configuration of IDE devices and controllers. It's best to have your system (boot) drive on Primary channel as Master. An additional hard drive should be Primary Slave. Optical writers should be on Secondary Master (your burner) and the read-only or secondary burner should be slaved. Optical drives and hard drives should be on the same channel, if you do a lot of burning / ripping (which is standard). If you do a lot of transfering of files between hard drives, it would stand to be the opposite, but not many people who be swapping files back and forth between IDE drives enough to demand the higher performance of having both channels access each drive at the same time, so you'd probably stick to HDDs on Primary channel and Optical devices (CD/DVD-ROM/RWs) on Secondary.
