ata66 hard drive and ata33 cdrom

[TP]

This is probly a stupid question. I bought a 20g barracudaII 7200rpm ata66 hard drive. I installed it as master with my 40speed cdrom drive as slave, on the same IDE. When I boot I notice the screen reads that I have my hard drive ata66 (as it should be) and it reads the cdrom as ata33. I think I read somewhere that this slows things down. I havent noticed any problems I am just wondering if this is true, and if so, can I change it without moving the cdrom to the other IDE slot? (I am planning to get cd-rw and dvd drives soon)..

 

[Techwhore]

well, you should keep your cdrom as a slave to the master on the primary chain if you're buying a burner too. The burner should be on a chain of it's own or with the dvd drive... reason being that IDE can only read or write at one time so if you hd is on the same chain as the burner you theoretically won't be able to successfully burn off the HDD or if your cd and burner are u won't be able to copy cd's... as for the ata 33 and the cdrom, u can right click on my computer and goto properties then device manager, then cdroms, right click your drive and enable DMA

 

[brow]

If you have different devices on the same ide connector, it will run at the lowest speed rated.. however, it is rar that you EVER actually get 33MB/s transfers, let alone 66MB/s. However the most effecient way to set it up would be to have your hard drive by itself on the primary (master), your cd-burner as your secondary master, and your other cdrom as secondary slave.. if your also gonna buy a dvd drive it doesn't really matter which channel the dvd or regular cdrom are on. The only time you can really even take advantage of the ATA66 is if you have two hard drives that both run ATA66

 

[pac1085]

Heres how you are going to want to set it up:

Primary Master: HD
Primary Slave: CD-Rom

Secondary Master: DVDRom
Secondary Slave: CD-RW

Thats normal that it says ATA/66 for the hard drive, and ATA/33 for the CD-Rom drive. As far as I know, having an ATA/33 deivce on an ATA/66 chain shouldnt slow anything down. I've had my setup like that for a LONG time until I got my KT7-Raid motherboard with the extra IDE controler on it, and it worked fine. Hope this helps.