i know that it can be significantly faster to use two seprate drives when rendering/converting video files (one where the source file/s is and the other for the destination file). but what if i had the drives on seperate ata cables (im using pata here) ? sure the cabling could get messy but wouldnt it make the rendering proces even faster ?
though what i wana ask is, will thier be any problems/conflicts having an optical and hard disk drive on the same ribbon/cable ?
using a hard and optical drive on one ata ribbon
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bum
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madmag9999
- Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2003 11:50 pm
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- Location: Pennsylvania
no there will not. but haveing a hdd and optical drive on the same ribbon slows everything down. it works fine just a bit slower.
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SS5_Majin_Bebi
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 8:07 pm
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Although he's better off categorising his drives a bit better, I have my HDs on one channel and my CD Burner and DVD rom on the other. I've also got my burner set as secondary master, which ensures the most stable burns at the best speed (apparently; and its performing really well compared to the way it was before...)madmag9999 wrote:no there will not. but haveing a hdd and optical drive on the same ribbon slows everything down. it works fine just a bit slower.
Your boot drive should also be Primary Master, and your drive for like games and DVDRips for editing, and other backup stuff, make that your Primary Slave.
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Zero1
- Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2004 12:51 pm
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Hmm...
ATA has been around for a while, I'll spare you the sentimental crap but basically ATA can't handle interleaved read/writes.
What does this mean and how does it affect you?
Lets say you have a CD ROM and a CDRW both connected to the Secondary port (which one is Master and Slave is irrelevant for now). When you copy a CD, the CD ROM reads and the CDRW writes. So in effect you have read and write operations trying to take place at the same time. Not gonna happen.
Chances are you or a friend have had burnouts, made shiny frisbees and/or coasters out of blank CDs. Both operating drives being connected to the same cable is a big factor in this. Since read and writes cannot function simultaneously on the same cable to the attached devices it has to take it in turns to read and write in an alternating pattern.
This creates delays and such and eventually leads to buffer underrun, or in other words another wasted CD (unless you have burn/bufferunderrun proof, but this slows down writing anyway).
So you see the effect it has on optical drives connected to the same cable, basically read/write transactions between them are slow and in some cases (such as CD writing) costly.
This same problem applies to Hard drives, though I would imagine the problem is magnified since there is so much data being accessed/written. Not to mention it's likely that one of those drives are likely to be your Windows drive, which is liable to do it's own thing and virus scan/system restore at random times.
But cable to cable is a whole other story.
Imagine there are no other drives connected, only a CD ROM and CDRW connected to the Primary Slave and the Secondary Slave. The drive on the Primary channel can read, uninterrupted by writes, and the drive on the Secondary Slave can write, uninterrupted by reads since they are on different channels.
So having drives on different channels is good isn't it? You bet.
Now let's take this scenario.
You have 2 Hard Drives, a CDROM and a CDRW.
If you trust what I say, you'll be connecting the CD drives on oppostite cables, and since the boot drive should really be the Primary Master, that leaves us with a Primary Slave. Put the CDROM on the Primary Slave. Why?
Remember that read and writes work better across channels. You wouldn't want to be copying stuff from your harddrive, to the CDRW on the same cable and having it stop and start because of the ATA limitation would you? Not to mention again with Windows liking to perform disk operations at seemingly inconvienient times.
So putting the CDRW on the cable that isn't the same as the Windows drive is what you ideally wan't to do to maximise transfer and stability.
We now have the Windows drive on the Primary Master, CDRW on the Secondary Slave (I always recommend HD's go on the Master cables, I also recommend getting a nice 80 pin cable to match the Primary cable, and replace the 40 pin Secondary with it).
That leave us with a Hard drive and a CDROM to connect. Obviously the HD will see more action in the form of reading and writing, also it has a bigger bandwith, so you'll want to give it priority over a little CDROM right?
Well just remember the cross cables rule, so put the HD2 on the Secondary Master (remember to change that crusty 40pin with a nice new 80 pin to maximise transfer!), that leaves us with the CDROM for Primary Slave.
Pros and cons
From the diagram above you will get:
-Good transfer between HD1 & HD2
-Good transfer between HD1 & CDRW
-Good transfer between CDROM & HD2
-Good transfer between CDROM & CDRW
-Bad transfer between CDROM & HD1
-Bad transfer between CDRW & HD2
If however you connect like this:
From the diagram above you will get:
-Good transfer between HD1 & CDRW
-Good transfer between HD2 & CDRW
-Good transfer between CDROM & HD1
-Good transfer between CDROM & HD2
-Bad transfer between HD1 & HD2
-Bad transfer between CDRW & CDROM
I'm not particularly saying either is right or wrong, but I have mine setup as below. As you can see, it makes me look a bit of a hypocrit, but with this many drives I tried to practice what I preach as best as I can. You may want to take note of Windows XP's DMA bug, I had to re-arrange 2 of the drives to get it to work in DMA mode.
Well all that's left is to try it and report back, don't forget to change the jumpers!!! Forgetting something simple like this gets me nearly every time. I once connected the ATA cables and forgot the power cables!!! I realised before I put it back together though
About CD drives slowing harddrives down when connected to the same cable, I believe this is no longer apparent as the transfer mode is asynchronous these days, ie a DVD drive can be UDMA 2 and a hard drive UDMA 5, whereas the problem you mention, I believe it only happened on ancient systems where the controller would set the same mode for both drives, the slowest. In that situation the HD would transfer at UDMA 2 max ( I believe it was a different speed/standard back then, not too sure)
ATA has been around for a while, I'll spare you the sentimental crap but basically ATA can't handle interleaved read/writes.
What does this mean and how does it affect you?
Lets say you have a CD ROM and a CDRW both connected to the Secondary port (which one is Master and Slave is irrelevant for now). When you copy a CD, the CD ROM reads and the CDRW writes. So in effect you have read and write operations trying to take place at the same time. Not gonna happen.
Chances are you or a friend have had burnouts, made shiny frisbees and/or coasters out of blank CDs. Both operating drives being connected to the same cable is a big factor in this. Since read and writes cannot function simultaneously on the same cable to the attached devices it has to take it in turns to read and write in an alternating pattern.
This creates delays and such and eventually leads to buffer underrun, or in other words another wasted CD (unless you have burn/bufferunderrun proof, but this slows down writing anyway).
So you see the effect it has on optical drives connected to the same cable, basically read/write transactions between them are slow and in some cases (such as CD writing) costly.
This same problem applies to Hard drives, though I would imagine the problem is magnified since there is so much data being accessed/written. Not to mention it's likely that one of those drives are likely to be your Windows drive, which is liable to do it's own thing and virus scan/system restore at random times.
But cable to cable is a whole other story.
Imagine there are no other drives connected, only a CD ROM and CDRW connected to the Primary Slave and the Secondary Slave. The drive on the Primary channel can read, uninterrupted by writes, and the drive on the Secondary Slave can write, uninterrupted by reads since they are on different channels.
So having drives on different channels is good isn't it? You bet.
Now let's take this scenario.
You have 2 Hard Drives, a CDROM and a CDRW.
If you trust what I say, you'll be connecting the CD drives on oppostite cables, and since the boot drive should really be the Primary Master, that leaves us with a Primary Slave. Put the CDROM on the Primary Slave. Why?
Remember that read and writes work better across channels. You wouldn't want to be copying stuff from your harddrive, to the CDRW on the same cable and having it stop and start because of the ATA limitation would you? Not to mention again with Windows liking to perform disk operations at seemingly inconvienient times.
So putting the CDRW on the cable that isn't the same as the Windows drive is what you ideally wan't to do to maximise transfer and stability.
We now have the Windows drive on the Primary Master, CDRW on the Secondary Slave (I always recommend HD's go on the Master cables, I also recommend getting a nice 80 pin cable to match the Primary cable, and replace the 40 pin Secondary with it).
That leave us with a Hard drive and a CDROM to connect. Obviously the HD will see more action in the form of reading and writing, also it has a bigger bandwith, so you'll want to give it priority over a little CDROM right?
Well just remember the cross cables rule, so put the HD2 on the Secondary Master (remember to change that crusty 40pin with a nice new 80 pin to maximise transfer!), that leaves us with the CDROM for Primary Slave.
Pros and cons
From the diagram above you will get:
-Good transfer between HD1 & HD2
-Good transfer between HD1 & CDRW
-Good transfer between CDROM & HD2
-Good transfer between CDROM & CDRW
-Bad transfer between CDROM & HD1
-Bad transfer between CDRW & HD2
If however you connect like this:
From the diagram above you will get:
-Good transfer between HD1 & CDRW
-Good transfer between HD2 & CDRW
-Good transfer between CDROM & HD1
-Good transfer between CDROM & HD2
-Bad transfer between HD1 & HD2
-Bad transfer between CDRW & CDROM
I'm not particularly saying either is right or wrong, but I have mine setup as below. As you can see, it makes me look a bit of a hypocrit, but with this many drives I tried to practice what I preach as best as I can. You may want to take note of Windows XP's DMA bug, I had to re-arrange 2 of the drives to get it to work in DMA mode.
Well all that's left is to try it and report back, don't forget to change the jumpers!!! Forgetting something simple like this gets me nearly every time. I once connected the ATA cables and forgot the power cables!!! I realised before I put it back together though
About CD drives slowing harddrives down when connected to the same cable, I believe this is no longer apparent as the transfer mode is asynchronous these days, ie a DVD drive can be UDMA 2 and a hard drive UDMA 5, whereas the problem you mention, I believe it only happened on ancient systems where the controller would set the same mode for both drives, the slowest. In that situation the HD would transfer at UDMA 2 max ( I believe it was a different speed/standard back then, not too sure)