Connecting Hds: Best way?

[pr-man 1]

I have 2 ata-100 Hds and 1 dvd-rom drive and cd-rw drive. I do have room to use a ATA-100 promise Ultra100TX2 controller I have if need be but would it be better and faster performance wise to have both HDs on the mobos primary channel since the mobo supports ata-100 and have the dvd-rom drive and cd-rw on the secondary channel? Thx

[Admiral LSD 0]

Putting the DVD and the CD-RW on the same channel would make disk-to-disk copying virtually impossible due to the way ATA only allows one device to talk to the controller at once. For the same reason, if you were to put a hard drive on the same channel as the CD-RW copying files from that HDD to the CD-RW would be impossible. The CD-RW is best given it's own chanell but since thats not an option I'd put a hard drive and the DVD on one channel (probably the primary) and the other hard drive and the CD-RW on the other.

[Dirty Harry 0]

This was discussed in the last few days in this thread:

http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23261&highlight=

 

 

H.

[pr-man 1]

admiral couldnt I put the two cd drives on the Promise ata-100 controller each as a master and then put the two HDs on the mobo as master and master

 

with the controller card and two channels on the mobo I essentially have 4 ide channels to work with

[adamvjackson 0]

Pr-man, I would do the exact opposite of what you said. I would attach the hard drives to the controller and the optical drives to the motherboard controllers. Not all PCI controller cards correctly support PIO devices (cdrom drives, zip drives, ls-120 drives, etc.). Just ensure that your bios supports booting from an add-in card first.

[pr-man 1]

well the reason I was thinking like I was is because under XP I get crappy performance with my HDs on the controller cards. I think its an SP1 issue.

 

I currently have it setup like you suggested and thats why im looking to switch.

 

Would promises site tell me if the card would support PIO?

[adamvjackson 0]

Possibly, worth a look, at any rate.

[pr-man 1]

This is what my manual says

 

Ultra100 TX2’s two IDE connectors each support a master/slave combination of IDE

devices, including Ultra ATA, EIDE, IDE, Fast-ATA, and ATAPI. Devices of different

standards can be connected to Ultra100 TX2 without performance degradation, due

to the independent programmable timing registers in the controller’s design.

[adamvjackson 0]

Well, I'd say give it a shot, then. According to the manual, you should be OK.