Will adding a DVD drive to the same IDE cable as the hard drive decrease performance?

[catback]

Hi,

I have an ASUS A7V133 board whose onboard controllers support Ultra ATA 100 drive speeds. Currently, the primary and secondary master positions each have an Ultra100 hard drive installed.

If I add a DVD/CD drive to the slave position on either channel, would the hard drive on that same cable as the DVD drive take a performance hit?

If so, how much decrease should I expect?

Thanks.

[tmac]

Short answer is yes. Your configuration depends on what you are going to do on your computer. I assume you mean for video capture? If so you should get an IO card to provide more ide slots, then put hard drives on separate cables.

[alexnoe]

Short answer: No!

Long answer:
Only one device can be active on one channel at one time. But since hard discs don't overoccupy the bus (unlike some dvd-roms, which occupy the bus longer than absolutely necessary), you won't feel any decrease of performance.
If you want to rip a DVD to your hard disc, then select the disc which does not share the channel with the dvd drive as destination.

An IO card is the worst thing you can do: Your crap chipset has a maximum PCI throughput of 65 MB/s, and it has no reasonable bus arbitration. Running a video capture card and a PCI I/O controller at the same time (i.e. capturing video to a hard disc attached to this card) will most likely not work.

[tmac]

All Buffers (i.e. the chips tied directly to the cable) of All drives connected to the IDE channel MUST respond to ANY data request on the channel before the data is considered valid and allowed to move along. Since it is a Parallel Cable - This means that even the drives with the fastest electronics are forced to wait for the slowest electronic response on the bus.
CD drives have such slow motors and physical charastics that mfr.s never bothered to spend much money (until recently) on the electronic bus interface for them because the electronics will ALWAYS be waiting for the physical disk to finish it's operation.