Master or Slave which for 2 HDs and DVD Drives

[mfrancis123]

Hi,
I just picked up a second hard drive today and wanted to know how to optimize my 4 drives across the two IDE adaptors. I have the following drives:

LG 16X DVD
Pioneer A05

WD 40GB 7200rpm 2MB
WB 80GD 7200rpm 8MB

Should both HDs be on the same adaptor or should each adaptor have one DVD and one HD. Also which drives should be master and which should be slaves?

I've heard software such as IC or DVD2One runs faster if you have the source and the destination on different drives. Should they also be on different adaptors?

Thanks

[bubbaleroy]

The DVD's should be on the same channel. They would slow down your HDD access. I would put the burner on the secondary master, DVD-ROM on the secondary slave. 40GB primary master (use as system disk), 80GB secondary slave (data drive).

[ducati9x]

I would disagree... in my experience, hd function poorly unless they are designated master (because of boot sequence defaults). You could put both on the same ribbon, but suffer serious performance loss if you tried to write to both at the same time... or copy from one to the other.

Also, conflicts can arrise if two dvd drives are on the same ribbon. Loss of basic function can sometimes occur due to competition... even if only one is used at one time. It seems the pc favors one over the other and dvd use (esp reading) is affected direly.

I would suggest setting both hd's as masters and both dvd drives as slaves, respectively. I.e. each ribbon with a hd and dvd. I have the same configuration and have experienced very few problems.

I hope this helps

[bubbaleroy]

I kind of agree with you, but as CD and DVD Drives are still UDMA33 and now HD are UDMA100/133 the CD/DVD will slow down the HD if on the same IDE channel. In my system I have 4 IDE channels, DVD+RW(IDE1-primary), 80GB UDMA100(IDE1-secondary), CD-RW(IDE2-primary), 2 120GB UDMA 133(IDE3-primary & IDE4-primary). As you can see my CD/DVD's are on separate channels (your suggestion) but my 80GB system disk suffers performance probs because it's on the same channel as my DVD.