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What is best setup re master-slave

Discussion in 'PC Hardware' started by jaycee, 2006/09/12.

  1. 2006/09/12
    jaycee

    jaycee Inactive Thread Starter

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    I Have Hard drive, CDRW drive, Zip drive and DVD drive.
    What is the best setup re Primary Master-Primary Slave Secondary Master-Secondary Slave
     
    jaycee,
    #1
  2. 2006/09/12
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    Hard Drive - Prime Master

    In what order do you use the other drives the most? If for example you use the DVD the most, make is Second Master.
     
    Steve R Jones,
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  4. 2006/09/16
    jaycee

    jaycee Inactive Thread Starter

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    I believe a CD ROM drive shouldn't be connected as Primary Slave but don't know why
     
    jaycee,
    #3
  5. 2006/09/16
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff

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    It has to be connected somewhere;)

    Between the CDRW drive, Zip drive and DVD drive which do you use the most? Whichever it is, it should be the primary secondary...
     
    Steve R Jones,
    #4
  6. 2006/09/16
    Christer

    Christer Geek Member Staff

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    On older morherboards (pre 2000 something?) that was true. The controller adopted the transfer speed of the slowest device. HDD UDMA5 as master and CD-ROM UDMA2 as slave would make the controller run both at UDMA2.

    On more recent motherboards, the controllers are capable of Independent Device Timing which means that each device runs at its own speed. I have tested on my own computer with a motherboard from 2001 and I notice no performance difference if I have HDD0 + HDD1 on IDE0 and CD-R/RW + DVD-ROM on IDE1 compared with HDD0 + CD-R/RW on IDE0 and HDD1 + DVD-ROM on IDE1. The only difference is that during bootup, it takes a few seconds longer to detect the devices when they are "mixed ".

    I run the devices HDD0 + HDD1 on IDE0 and CD-R/RW + DVD-ROM on IDE1.

    Christer
     
    Christer,
    #5
  7. 2006/09/17
    jaycee

    jaycee Inactive Thread Starter

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    Hi Christer, My MB is about 5 years old so may be OK. If you had 1 HD a CDRW a DVD and a Zip drive, used in that order, how would you link them?
     
    jaycee,
    #6
  8. 2006/09/17
    Christer

    Christer Geek Member Staff

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    Hi jaycee!

    I can not give you an answer to your question since I have no experience with zip-drives and don't even know how they work in terms of transfer modes and such. I assume that you have a lot of disks that you want to use so, telling you to not install it is probably not an option you would accept. I can only keep you company while you wait for a response from someone else.

    Christer
     
    Christer,
    #7
  9. 2006/09/18
    mattman

    mattman Inactive Alumni

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    Hi,

    The optical drives should run in DMA mode 2 or ATA 33. I would expect the Zip drive to be one of those as well. Look up the specifications for your model at the Iomega website. If it happens to only run in PIO mode, put it on the secondary controller.

    If the Zip drive is DMA 2, ATA 33 or higher, I would run it on the primary controller.

    If you are interested in getting some figures like Christer did, test the drives in one or two different configurations. Sandra in my signature has drive benchmarking. Do a benchmark on your HDD with one or two different configurations.

    You can also benchmark your drives/system at PCpitstop, www.pcpitstop.com.

    A small program I have rarely used is HDtach (check at www.majorgeeks.com).

    If you do any experiments, let us know the results, it would be interesting.

    Matt
     
    mattman,
    #8

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