Multiple IDE drives

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Hi

I’m currently running a pc with 1 x SATA drive configured as my boot drive. I also have an IDE drive connected on 1 IDE channel and configured as a master. On the other IDE channel, I have a DVD rewriter.

I now want to add another IDE hard drive, and I am wondering. My three choices seem to be

a) add the IDE drive as a slave on channel 1

add the IDE drive as a slave on channel 2

c) add the IDE drive as a master on channel 2 and re-assign the DVD rewriter to become the slave.

All the hard disks will be used regularly, and for some heavy duty photoshop work creating single files sometimes in the range of 200Mb to 300Mb. The DVDdrive on the other hand is rarely used, though I do run some back-ups to DVD (for off-site storage) using this drive.

Am I better to go for option C giving me the optimum performance from the hard disks? Am I likely to suffer a performance hit when DVD writing to a slave. I do most back-ups overnight, so there is little hard disk activity at this time.

Thanks

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The question is “How often will you are be running applications that will need to access both disks concurrently?”. If the answer is seldom, you won’t see any performance difference by having them both on the same channel. The only downside I could see for having the drive on the second IDE channel would be possible buffering issues when burning DVDs.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks

In fact that’s how I connected them initially. I did fear there might be an issue with the DVD burning. I think I can accept the situation as it is. All of IDE drive1 is storage, with my C: drive sitting happliy on the Sata.

Thanks for the advice

Colin

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