I'm 5 hours into building my first PC...I'm still lost...and trying to install 2 hard drives...

[Sukhoi]

If you can enable DMA, I would assume your CD-RW is ATA33 compatible. If you have the CD-RW installed in a system, look in the BIOS as it sometimes says what mode your IDE devices are running in.

 

[rnmcd]

Sukhoi- I found out that my CD-RW is PIO 4 (16mb sec) but it can be enabled to DMA. Does that mean that my CD-RW is ATA33 compatible but also 16mb/sec?

Will my system be optomized if I put the OS hard drive and the CD-RW on the same IDE cable?

-rnmcd

 

[Crypticburn]

enamble DMA, yes your drive is ata33 compatable, if I remember correctly.... If you enable DMA, put the 15gig as Prim Master, and CDR as Primary slave w/ the 30gig as second master.... although you wont see a great improvement with the HD's seperated, only when copying from one to the other... and that isnt even that significant... also, you'll be forced to use your 30gig to store the data that you will burn onto CDs b/c you dont wanna burn onto the CDs from the 15gig b/c it will be on the same chain

 

[rnmcd]

Crytpicburn- if I don't use the hard drive that shares the same chain as the CD-RW to burn CDs can I still use that CD-RW(rom) to upload software onto the hard drive (the one on same chain)?

 

[Sukhoi]

Rnmcd, I would suggest buying a real CD-ROM drive, and having that in your computer along with the CD-RW. I've heard that the laser heads in CD-RWs are heavier than the lasers in normal CD-ROMs, so to make your CD-RW last as long as possible, I'd only use to to burn CD-Rs and CD-RWs. A cheap CD-ROM can be picked up for under $40, and it'd be a good investment to prolong the life of your CD-RW.

Anyway, for cable setup, I would suggest the following:

IDE1 Master: 15 GB hard drive
IDE1 Slave: CD-RW with DMA enabled
IDE2 Master: 30 GB hard drive
IDE2 Slave: CD-ROM that's ATA33 compatible

I'm pretty sure most modern CD-ROMs are ATA33 compatible. I picked up a cheap ATA33 compatible Digital Research (which still hasn't returned my $10 rebate BTW :|) 40x for $30 including the rebate. I use the 40x CD-ROM for most everything, and I only use my HP 8250i CD-RW for burning CDs.

 

[rnmcd]

What advantages/disadvantages would there be to me adding an IDE controller card?

This would eat up another IRQ, right?

-rnmcd

 

[ElFenix]

you can copy between a cdrom on a cable and a hard drive on the same cable just fine. if you add another ide controller you can give everything its own channel (which is my setup) so you don't have any conflicts. also, the new ibm drives are faster than ata-33 spec, so you can get maximum performance with an ata 66 or 100 card. modern pcs don't really have to worry too much with irqs, but intel still should have built more into the chipset a long time ago.

 

[rnmcd]

ElFenix or anyone- which controller card would you recommend?


I have heard that the Matrox HDs (which I have) don't perform very well with the Promise cards.

Later, rnmcd

 

[dszd0g]

The fastest 7200RPM drives the 75GXP do 37MB/sec sustained and higher burst. There is probably going to be a slight difference between ATA33 and ATA66. However, all the benchmarks I have seen place no difference between ATA66 and ATA100 at this point.

I have also read that you may have stability issues (read random crashes) if one device on a chain has DMA enabled and the other doesn't. So if your CDRW does not support DMA you probably want it on a chain by itself.