IDE Controller And DVDr Burner?

[TCrowe]

I have a Silicon Graphics IDE Controller and have one HD on Port 1 and my NEC 1300A on the Second Port. I really do not have any problems with this setup. Burnt discs work on my standalone but I do get the occasional bad discs and my FUJI's (RICOHJPNR00) could look better on the DVD-Info speed tests (no errors however).

The concern is I read all the time that you should not put any optical (especially DVD burners) drives on a controller. However no one explains why that is not a good idea or if you do use a controller with DVD burner what kind of specific problems you would experience. Anyone have any advice or recommendations?

Thanks,

[Happygolucky]

I'm not sure what you mean by not putting a drive on a controller. All drives need some sort of interface to connect. IDE "controllers" aren't really controllers in the strictest sense, they are merely an interface to the system bus. IDE devices have their controllers built-in. That is why you need to set each device as to whether it is master or slave. Anyway, for IDE burners it is desired that they be a master device. Having the burner as a slave device, especially to your dominate hard-drive, can cause problems since the IDE interface can only handle one device at a time (the Master and the slave must take turns with I/O operations, they cannot do so simulaneously). Now, most computer systems have two IDE interfaces, which would allow a device on one interface to have I/O simultaneously with a device on the other interface. That would allow a hard drive on one to read while the burner on the other could write, for example. Less chance of buffer-underrun conditions.

So, if you have your hard drive as a single device or master on IDE0 and your burner as single device or master on IDE1, then you have done what you can in that regard. You might want to check whether your drivers have implemented DMA access. If they haven't, and are operating in PIO mode, then you could very well experience problems.

[TCrowe]

What I ment was that I added a PCI ATA/133 Controller (2 channels on the MB and now 2 more on the card) card and have my burner on that PCI card.

What I have read was that adding any optical/DVD burners onto these PCI Controllers is not adviced. Just wanted more information on why and are there any specific problems.

Thanks for the reply...

[smiller667]

I guess you have a Silicon Image chipset :) ... I can give you one reason from personal experience with a Highpoint controller: they failed to set any UDMA modes on my optical drives. For the a 12x CD-R it is not so bad (though it eats nearly 100% CPU time in PIO mode), but using the DVD-R on such a channel is out of the question.

This of course all depends on the type of chipset, its BIOS, drivers and OS you are using, ymmv.

[TCrowe]

So far everything seems to work. I use Nero, RecordNowMax and DVD Decrypter and none of them have failed to recognize or write to the drive. Like I stated in my first post, burning appears to work except the occasional bad disc but leaves me wondering if my DVD-Info tests could look better.

I looked at the Silicon Image (not Silicon Graphics as mentioned above) device driver and it reports the NEC Transfer mode at Multi Word DMA. I do not have CPU utilization issues either.

[Happygolucky]

Originally posted by TCrowe
So far everything seems to work. I use Nero, RecordNowMax and DVD Decrypter and none of them have failed to recognize or write to the drive. Like I stated in my first post, burning appears to work except the occasional bad disc but leaves me wondering if my DVD-Info tests could look better.

I looked at the Silicon Image (not Silicon Graphics as mentioned above) device driver and it reports the NEC Transfer mode at Multi Word DMA. I do not have CPU utilization issues either.

If it is operating the drive in DMA mode, then there really is nothing else of concern. The only reason for any sort of problem would have to do with screwy drivers, but that is relatively unlikely. There are going to be bad discs occassionally with any setup. I have a Yamaha UltraSCSI burner connected to an Adaptec SCSI controller and even it gives the occassional coaster. I chalk it up to either bad media or the burning gods needing a sacrifice :-)

[TCrowe]

Thanks for all the help....Think I am going to leave the setup alone. I thought moving things around might improve my burns but the more I read it sounds that everything is operating fine.