Whats the optimium way to connect IDE devices?

[jweaver]

I currently have 2 x Harddisks, a 24x CD Writer and 104 DVD Writer and have it connected as follows:

IDE 0 Master - 7200rpm 60gig HD with 2 partitions
IDE 0 Slave - Pioneer 104
IDE 1 Master - 5400 HD 40gig HD
IDE 1 Slave - Plextor 24x Writer

All are connected using 'high density' IDE cables.

Is this way the most optimum or is there a better way?

Another school of though is to have the 2 Hard-Drives on the same channel.

I am only concerned, as I have had a couple of DVD write failures and want to be sure that I have everything setup correctly.

Any info appreciated

Jon

[FDISK]

The only thing to do really is to make sure that any drives you wish to use simultaneously are NOT on the same cable. for example, if you wish to burn to the CDRW, make sure it's on a different IDE cable than the HDD you're burning from. The most used drive should be master on the cable. Also, make sure you use ATA/66 (80 wire) IDE cables, as they have the best signal integrity, allowing for better performance even on ATA/33 hardware.

[Zeppeliner]

If both your harddrives are ata66 or higher then I would put them on the same controller, or else you won't take advantage of ata66/100/whatever (you need an ata66 cable as mentioned), since you will be limited to the speed of the slowest type device on the controller - and though I'm not sure on this I don't think your optical drives are anything more than ata33.
So I would put the hdds as ide1 master & slave, I guess it doesn't really matter with the two burners though, although since I see it as likely that you use the plextor more (pure speculation ofcourse :)) I'd put it as master. In any case, since you here have the harddrives and burners on separate controllers you are "safe" when burning, as the pressure is not on one controller alone.

[nikthebak]

Pioneer 104 supports only ATA33 (Pioneer introduced ATA66 at models 106 and 116) so your 60 GB HDD currently runs at ATA33. Your best option would be to do what Zeppeliner says, put HDDs in primary IDE channel and optical drives in secondary channel.

Also it's generally recommended to keep your ripping-purpose DVD drive and HDD at different IDE channels. This will improve ripping performance quite a bit.

The downside of this solution is that you can forget 24X "on-the-fly" CD copying. One IDE channel can reliably sustain data rates of around 12-16X (CD-ROM speed). Therefore also your HDD-to-HDD copies will be painfully slow :(.

Edit:

That ~12X master-to-slave data rate is empirically tested with 16X Plextor writer. Burn-Proof was activated all the time when writing at 16X...

[Blogas]

It seems to be very strange, but in HP site i have found recomendation to turn off UDMA mode on CDRW drive .

It must be done in BIOS configuration changing auto setting to CDROM setting(It turns automaticaly to PIO mode). I had a lot of problems burning, till i did it.

Greetings

[nikthebak]

Blogas, at jweaver's case that would limit either HDD 0 or Pioneer 104 to PIO 4. Both options are simply intolerable :(.

With a modern OS (NT/2k/XP or Linux) and a modern CD-RW (Like the Plextor) there should be absolutely no harm in using UDMA.

[tjh011]

I would also put both of the hard drives on the same channel.

Another thing you could do is buy a Promise ATA100 PCI Controller and put every drive as a master on their own channel. That would also speed things up. You can get one for about $30. Try newegg.com if you decide to go that route.