IDE STUFF! ew! :)

[evilcow]

current setup:
ide channel #0 -> udma66(10gb) + udma33(cdrom)
ide channel #1 -> udma 100 (60gb) + udma 100 (60gb)

we know that if i wanted to stripe the two 60gb drives, there would be no performance difference.. cause they're sharing the same channel. but if i connect them on different channels, then you know raid (by striping) works a lot faster. but if i do this prefered setup:

ide channel #0 -> udma66(10gb) + udma 100 (60gb)
ide channel #1 -> udma33(cdrom) + udma 100 (60gb)

would ide chan #0 run @ udma 66
and idechan #1 run @ udma 33?
or does this only happen when lets say the 10gb (udma 66) is doing something, and the 60gb (udma 100) on the same channel (chan #0).. are working simulatenously.. then this makes the drives run @ minimum speed udma 66? but if i just use the 60gb on the channel #0, it'll work at udma 100?
vice versa.. for the devices on ide channel #1? your answers will be appreciated =) thanks.

 

[bigshooter]

get a pci ide raid card and use that for your raid only. Use your onboard ide for the other stuff.

 

[mschell]

If you mean software RAID0 using dynamic disk, there is not much performance drop even with two drives on one channel. Since the array is striped, there is no real concurrent disk access and both drives maximum output is well below 100MB/s.
Contrary to popular belief, a UDMA/xx device won't default to the slowest device UDMA level on the IDE channel. What does happen is when two devices are reading and writing at the same time, the faster device may have to wait for the slower device to finish it's read/write before it can do a read/write. CDROMS are paticulary bad slaved to hard drives because of there slow access times as compared to a hard drive, a given read operation takes awhile.
The good news is even the slowest device has no effect on the faster on when it's not reading or writing so it's generally ok to slave a CD burner to the fastest drive as you won't be doing much disk intensive work while burning a CD.

 

[renorocks]

If you have a pci raid card, just use the raid card for your raided drives and your motherboard port for your other ide devices. If you have a motherboard with on board raid, you typically have your 2 ata 100 ports plus 2 raid ports. Just connect the devices you want to raid to the raid ports. If you are using software raid, follow "bigshooter's advice."

Older mobos did drop your overall speed to the slowest device when sharing an ide port, but for the last year or so that has not been the case. At least that is what I have been led to believe via the mobo manufacturers.