I have a primary and secondary IDE controller, and have two hard drives as my master/slave on the primary IDE. Has anyone ran across any problems with putting a DVD burner as a master and DVD-ROM as a slave on the same IDE controller when copying DVD's? I dont want to copy from one drive to the other, just using the DVD-ROM to copy DVD's to the hard drive for burning. Shark
Done all the time. However a lot of people put the ROM on the secondary master and the burner on the secondary slave, unless there is something in the instructions that specifically call for a drive to be in a particular position. In some cases the ROM is faster than the burner is the reason for the suggestion.
It all depends on your system really. Both drives on the same IDE cable work fine for most people. You can paly around with where each of your drives go and see if you notice any difference, but chances are if its a good mother board it wont make any noticable difference to you. Now if your really good and get SATA drives then you would be cookin'
In what way does it depend on the system? As long as the jumpers are set correctly on the drives, it will work either way. It's just that sometimes a slower drive at master will cause the slave to run slower at reads. It's not going to effect the burn. One just doesn't want to put a drive on the primary with the HD unless it's a have to on an old system. There the HD would be the master. Yes, SATA is nice, however the conversion also calls for a card to convert the older systems. If one is going to the extreme, why not SATA in a RAID 0 setup with a RAID card, then there's twin Xeon processors. Back down to earth...
Well I tell ya what I build and work on computers for a living and if you have a system with a generic or crap motherboard it makes all the difference in the world where you put your drives on the IDE cable. Thats why I say it depends on your system, but most newer systems will have no problems no matter where you put the drives as long as jumpers are set right, and your primary hard drive should always be on Primary Master other than that it dosent really matter as long as jumpers are set right and correspond with where the drive is on the cable. It also helps if people update there BIOS and drivers for there Motherboards every so often, but a lot of people over look this. Back down to earth??? SATA capability comes on almost all new MOBO now a days and they are far easier and about 300x faster than any IDE only thing is Plextor is the only ones that make a DVD/R SATA drive right now, but the rest will follow soon. All the manufacturers make SATA HD's. I was just suggesting SATA is good and it's in no way pricey or hard to get like the SCSI interface was/is. If you have a MOBO with SATA capabilities I would suggest you give it a try you would be very immpressed at the speed
bbmayo Let's hope you don't build any of those PCs you mentioned with the crappy boards and chips. As you know, if you run across one of those, you shouldn't even try to put another drive in it (trash belongs in the trash). I'd suspect problems with a dual connector cable with only a master on such a system, and that's primary or secondary. Glad you told us about it. Yes, as a professional, you should know better than others that most PCs don't have SATA drives (as you noted). Even most of the ones in homes, other than the newer ones, aren't SATA capable, much less equipped. (Currently, SATA capable PCs are much in the minority in the schools, home and the work place. As new units come online the averages change, but it takes a while.) Also, what small improvement in time achieved is offset by the cost and nuisance of hardware replacement. [bold]If one can buy SATA equipped new, by all means do so. But if it is a retrofit, I'd advise waiting until the original equipment tears up. Then that could mean waiting for the purchase of the present PC's replacement in many cases.[/bold] Thoughts like that do hamper some of the rampant "try it because it's new" buying, building, and refitting.
Not really a palatable discussion for most newbies. My best advise is most PCs, if they have the case space, can run a master/slave setup (if they're worth the powder to blast them out the door). If it's junk, use some common sense. The best plan is to get a diagram for your particular PC. Some, for instance Dell, use an auto select system (CSEL on the rear jumper) to assign master/slave positions for the PC drive. Others use the Master/Slave jumpers on the rear of the drives. So, the requirements for doing the job oneself is knowing the Master/Slave/CSel jumper positions and Master/Slave position on the cable. The rest is just mechanics and knowing not to touch the electrical components. For you, disconnect the power and keep your hands off the components; and for the PC, take static electricity precautions. BBMayo is the professional, so maybe he has a handy chart he uses to explain the setup to newbies like me. With the setup diagramed for you by a pro, you'd have to work at going wrong on an installation.
since when was sata 300x faster bbmayo??? try 150mbs theoretical bandwidth compared to 133mbs pata hard drives and the same for dvd sata drives compared to pata. the only time your ever going to need all that extra 17mbs is with 10,000+rpm hard drives, an optical drive is never going to need that much, and copes quite well on ata100. When v2 of sata comes out (300mbs) you will still need brand new hard drives/o-drives to utilise it
Thanks for the info guys. I made sure to get one of the better motherboards for my computer - ASUS brand. Just wanted to see if this setup has caused anyone any problems before I attempted it. Thanks all!
