Slow Mobo IDE Channels

[Soltep]

I recently purchased an epox ep-8kha+ . I noticed that the time to transfer from my primary to slave on ide channel on the Mobo was slow. However I just put in a promise ide controller card to add more drives. The transfer off the drive attached to the promise card has blazing speed and is ten times faster than the transfer on the mobo ide channels. Is there anything to speed up the transfer times? A change in the bios? Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

-Jeremy

 

[Soltep]

PS all the drives are 7200 ibm deskstar drives. The fastest one is the 100 gig, of which all the other drives are smaller.

 

[buckchoi]

Maybe try putting one of the drives as primary on the second IDE channel.

 

[Soltep]

can i put my cd burner and dvd drive as slaves on two different channels and keep the hds primaries?

 

[Soltep]

could it be because i don't have my secondary ide channels set to slave and master? although it seems to boot correctly showing my cd burner as my master and dvd drive as slave on ide 2

 

[Peter]

Problem is that two drives on the same IDE channel don't run concurrently. That's a limitation inherent to IDE, and _that_ is what makes copying from master to slave slow.

For copying processes to be as fast as the drives can do, you need source and target to be on different IDE channels. This is also true for CD writing!

 

[buckchoi]

Yep totally agree.....but there is one problem
How do we get the cables to reach!
Say we have 2 CD drives and 2 HDD.
In most cases the HDD mounts are under the floppy mounts. The CD mounts are right at the top of the case.
How do we set up so we have one CD drive and one HDD on each IDE cable when theres only like 15cm between the IDE plugs on the cable!

 

[Peter]

Welcome to reality. IDE, electrically, sucks. This is because its creators have never dared add termination to the far end of the cable, thus the ridiculous max cable length.

IDE cables may not be longer than 45 cm. How you get to the topmost stuff in your big tower case is entirely your problem. (Serial ATA will, finally, fix that.)

regards, Peter

 

[CraigRT]

Peter is right... but my problem is, my 18" cables do not let me do this... so I just end up putting my 2 hdd's on one channel, and the 2 CD drives on the other. I can't do it any other way!!

 

[Peter]

You could have used SCSI. You get 1.5 to 12 meters per cable, depending on how many devices and what kind of SCSI. Too late