Confused about proper HD layout?

[Fdizme]

Hello All,
With an Abit motherboard I have 2 ATA sockets and 2 IDE sockets. My 2 hard drives are on the same cable master slave both on single ATA socket. CD rom and Zip drive on ide separate sockets both slaves. It works so I left well enough... Should I put Hd's on differant ATA sockets Set as master and slave? Will this increases transfer speeds on bus??... I understand the cd rom conflict and all is well with disabling via software. No conflict now. Thanks for your patience!!!!!!

 

[Opus2000]

Well...cant say I have much experience with 4 controllers on one motherboard like that! Typically I avoid boards like that so that the bus speed per controller is not bogged down. I reccomend keeping hard drives seperate on cables. When ever you put two drives on one cable it can bog you down possibly causing some lag in data reading. A bus speed(whether it is ATA 66 or 100) can be reduced to half when both drives are being used at the same time. What ABIT board is it? I'll look into the specs for it and give you some hard facts as to how to set it up properly. Remember that if the Zip drive is being used as well as the hard drive you could bog it down even worse. Zip drives really dont have a fast thruput speed.Let me know about the model of the board and I'll get back to ya on that one
Opus

 

[Fdizme]

Hey Opus!
Abit BE6-II motherboard. Ultra ATA/66 connectors 3&4. IDE connectors 1&2 on motherboard. Zip and CDrom happy on 1&2 as slaves. So far I guess splitting hard drives on separate connectors better. Thanks for looking into this. Your "act" is very user friendly!! Technical translations are a pleasure!!!

 

[sturgis58]

Hi Guys, I'm going to get in on this as well, as I've also tried putting 2 drives on separate cables. My specs :
PIII 600
Intel 440BX Chipset; ATX form factor
512KB L2 Pipeline Burst Cache
32KB internal L1 Cache (16KB instruction cache and 16KB data cache
ATA100 controller w/2- 30gig ATA100 drives
Currently the drives are on 1 cable, as Master/Slave. When I installed the 2nd drive, I attempted to use a separate cable. All went well until I got to the Partition step, which is when the installer would freeze up.I tried doing the install twice with the jumpers set for Master, and the 2nd time Slave. Neither would work. Finally, I settled for both drives on one cable, which set-up flawlessly, without a hitch.Maxtor tech support never responded to my email inquiry, so my feeling that a Bios setting may have been the culprit has gone unanswered. What do you think?
sturgis58
btw OPUS, I agree w/you about Sonar. Ultimately, wasting weeks trying to get software to work is a waste of time...

 

[JCG]

sturgis58,

What ATA-100 controller do you have? I have heard of some issues with the Promise chips integrated onto motherboards (I assume its the same basic controller chip they use in their cards), so perhaps that is why a double cable set up is giving you grief.

Cheerz,
John

 

[sturgis58]

Originally posted by JohnG:
sturgis58,

What ATA-100 controller do you have? I have heard of some issues with the Promise chips integrated onto motherboards (I assume its the same basic controller chip they use in their cards), so perhaps that is why a double cable set up is giving you grief.

Cheerz,
John
Hi John, thanks for the feedback. The card is a Maxtor Ultra ATA100 PCI card. It came as a package deal with the DiamondMax ATA100 30gb 7200 drives I bought. It was a sweet deal with a $50 rebate.I have to say that hassles, vis a vis the install, were worth it for the massive performance boost my system is enjoying now. (LOL...I sound like a f'n salesman)